If you empathize…they will come

Kevin Costner heard the words in the movie Field of Dreams about an ex minor league baseball player struggling as a farmer in Iowa. Mounting debt and a daughter with health issues strained his life until one day the fateful words, ‘if you build it, he will come’ became not only the movie’s haunting ode but to a whole generation of movie fans who’d also come to find a message of lost dreams, hope and personal redemption it meant they too could find comfort in believing there is more to life than what they may think they know.

One of the few hollywood movies to so successfully straddle the realities of true-life struggles and the unfulfilled dreams of adults, Field of Dreams’ idealized ways of life, of values, culture and principles. Costner’s character already near bankrupt, clears his only source of income, his vast cornfields, to build a baseball diamond on the insistence of the voice telling him to do so.

The standout message of the film is, not was, having the capacity to see things through others’ eyes. You know, the old “putting yourself in another’s shoes…” adage. The powerful, frightening scene where the cynical banker-type played by outstanding character actor Timothy Busfield implores Costner’s daughter to stop seeing ghosts of past baseball players results in a fall that captures the essence of our own beliefs.

In a moment a young girl’s truth of how she sees the world, which her father shares with her, is spun into an idea struggling to live. Out from the world of the unseen steps a grizzled old doctor played by Burt Lancaster, who comes to the aid of the fallen girl from his ghostly world of baseball and Iowa cornfields but in doing so, gives up his right to return to it therefore agreeing to an earthly death. It’s a breathtaking, awesome sequence of selflessness and discovering what it means to ‘see’ and to feel what it’s like to ‘…walk a mile in someone else’s shoes’.

So many lessons resonated with millions of moviegoers then, and they still inform us today. If you empathize with someone’s plight, a person’s own perspective, new worlds of understanding and wisdom are exchanged. Not a bad trade.