Finding purpose when you least expect it
The film ‘Living’ offers an interesting example of how a sense of purpose can be found when we least expect it.
Mr Williams (played brilliantly by the actor Bill Nighy) is the middle-aged manager of the Public Works department of the London County Council (forerunner of the GLC) in the 1950’s. Four of his team members travel to the office with him every day by commuter train. They all wear bowler hats and barely converse on the journey. Once in the office success is measured not by the amount of throughput but by the size of the uncleared paperwork in each person’s in-tray, referred to fondly as ‘the mountain’. It is common practice for decisions to be passed around the building from department to department, with the outcome being papers being added to the pile without a decision being made. Conversation between the team members is muted and formal, with no use of first names.
Into this mix come three determined women from a poor part of East London seeking permission to build a small play area for deprived children in an old, dilapidated and unused site. They get treated like everyone else and leave frustrated.
One day Mr Williams leaves early for a doctors’ visit where he is informed he has terminal cancer and has between six and nine months to live. He takes the news in silence. Once at home he cannot bring himself to share the news with his son and daughter-in-law who live with him. We next see him in a seaside town shortly afterwards, where he sits in a tea shop looking dejected. A stranger who suffers from insomnia engages him in conversation, during which Mr Williams produces several bottles of sleeping tablets from his pocket and offers them to the stranger. Mr Williams had come away from London with the plan of taking his life but can’t bring himself to do it. The stranger takes the tablets and then, seeing Mr Williams is unhappy, takes him on a pub crawl to cheer him up.
Mr Williams returns to London and bumps into the one female member of his team, a youthful Miss Harris, at Waterloo station. They engage in conversation and rather than return to the office, he invites her to afternoon tea at Fortnum’s. She is delighted. As she is a person of character, she begins to cheer him up, even sharing her nicknames for all the team members including his (‘Mr Zombie’). He does not take offence but smiles and you can visibly see his approach to life changing. He shares his diagnosis with her. They visit the cinema together and he starts to relax.
Shortly afterwards he becomes inspired and returns to the office after a few days of unexplained absence (no-one else in the team knows of his diagnosis). He informs his team in no uncertain terms that they are to accompany him immediately to the East End in pouring rain. They reach the proposed play area and ignoring the offer of an umbrella Mr Williams charges into the site, not concerned that he is walking through raw sewage, and starts giving instructions on how the site should be laid out. They all return to County Hall where he then walks from department to department showing determination that all the additional permissions needed should be granted without delay. He won’t take no for an answer, even confronting the Head of the Council, a knight of the realm to whom everyone else is obsequious and persuades him to approve the project.
The three women who sponsored the project see him as a hero.
What happened here? He found his purpose. A bit late in life maybe but better late….. The film ends with Mr Williams sitting on a swing in the completed park, smiling happily and singing to himself. Yes it’s fiction but does it make you think? Do share your thoughts.
If you want to watch the film you can find it here:-