March 5, 2011- “Tangled and Hoodwinked”

     Tonight, we took the boys to see the movie Tangled, which is a modern Disney version of the Rapunzel story.  Of course, I love the classic versions of all the well known fairy tales, but it’s such a nice change to see old stories given a new twist, a fresh image.  I’ve seen tons of brand new animated movies over the years, but it’s not often they go back, take a classic, and redo it with a modern flare because everyone wants to see the old stories just the way they remember them.  The last one I recall seeing that fit this category of the “old made new again” is Hoodwinked, a version of the Little, Red Riding Hood tale.  In college, I enjoyed a different version of Shakespeare’s classic, Romeo and Juliet, which appeared with the original language, but in a very modern California setting with the two families transformed into two gangs in the hood. Most people I have discussed this movie with did not like it, but I did.  Again, it was a fresh perspective on an old story, just like Hoodwinked and Tangled.  This causes me to wonder...why do we so often resist change and new ways of doing and seeing things in our small world? 
     I find this is one of the negatives of living on a very tiny, isolated island where nothing much changes in the environment around you.  It tends to translate to nothing much changing in any area of life here, and sometimes you just need a change. New people move onto the island and often instantly begin to want to change things to make them work more efficiently and effectively, but more time than not their ideas are pushed aside or they are told we can’t change that without any rational explanation why.  We simply get stuck in our ways sometimes.  Change is good; fresh ideas are revitalizing, and as the wooden plaque my mom sent me for my birthday says, “if nothing changed, there’d be no butterflies.”  As I have said before, I believe it is so important to be open to change, to be willing to grow and learn, even when you think everything is fine the way it is.  Becoming complacent in the workplace and in life keeps us from knowing an existence full of possibilities and promise we never even imagined.   So, next time you have the

opportunity to be hoodwinked by a new idea or tangled in a new adventure, just go with it as you never know what spectacularly awesome changes it might bring your way!