I don’t know about you, but I really like this movie. It’s a story about one unique person who finds a job that fits him. He loves to see people smile and he can get people to smile when he validates and finds something positive to say about them. It’s a wonderful twist that his job is to validate parking tickets and it tickles my fancy that people not only get their parking ticket validated but they themselves get validated. By talking with him, they feel better about themselves. And the movie shows me that sometimes when we are focused on a goal that is sometimes out of our control, we can get discouraged. He couldn’t get Victoria to smile and after a while, he couldn’t smile either. He got lost in not being able to make Victoria smile, especially because he had fallen in love. But as life would have it, he found himself again when the couple outside of Universal theaters asked him to take their picture and they offered him a smile without his asking. It was then that his gift, his spark of life, came back to him. The other part that I liked was the part where Hugh learned that Victoria had found her smile, because he had helped her mother find her smile again. I really like that we don’t know the effect of our actions. It reminds me of the Unitarian Universalist principle that we respect the interconnected web of existence and that we are all connected.
For me, this movie, and this idea of validation helps me to be faithfully connected to living my Unitarian Universalist faith.
Validation means to demonstrate or support the truth or value of someone’s feelings or stories and to think about how it is for them. To validate some else, their experience, the way they look at the world is a learned skill, because we have to no think about ourselves or that we have to fix the situation.
Validation is a skill that we can learn and it is a living example of putting our Unitarian Universalist principles into action.
By consciously choosing to validate someone we are:
Acknowledging the inherent worth and dignity of every person; we are treating every person as important.
We are accepting one another and encouraging them to spiritual growth and learning and growing with them.
And when we validate ourselves and each other, we are working for and helping to create a more peaceful world. And peace, like validation, ripples out to encourage just and sustainable communities where there is a better chance for liberty and justice for everybody.
For as much as Unitarian Universalism is a religion that encourages an open mind, a loving heart and helping hands, it doesn’t tell us exactly how to do that. It trusts and encourages us to find our own way of doing that. It validates that each of us are individuals who will find our way, just like Hugh found his way. In it supports us if we lose our way, and helps us to find our spark, our inner light, just like Hugh was able to find his way again. And it calls on us to find ways to live it.
By validating someone we demonstrate that we care and that their feelings matter to us-- in other words, that they matter to us. By "mirroring" someone's feelings, we show them that we are in tune with them. We feel connected with them and they feel connected with us.
