We started off with Question 8, and moved quickly from the rights that are granted by our governments to the rights that we feel inside. It seemed like it was a question of who actually GIVES us certain rights, and in terms of the internal ones (like whether I have the right to ask for what I want, stand up for myself, interrupt people who are talking too much, etc.) it seems like only I can give myself those rights. In fact, those rights seem to only exist when I myself am CONVINCED that I have those rights.
Then we moved to Question 3, where we talked about the necessity of setting our own limits for how much time we want to spend in relationships where we are giving more than we are receiving. Someone said that they realized they could spend time with dysfunctional people as long as she was clear about her own needs and was able to leave/stop the conversation when she felt like it was too much for her.
Someone mentioned the three rings of marriage: the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and then the suffer-ring.
We finished up with Question 4, with someone saying that she had spent a lot of time caring for her kids and that they had turned out very well. However, now that her kids are adults, she wonders whether it might have been wiser for her to not focus as exclusively on them, and instead spend more time focused on her own personal development and learning about herself. She said that this is an ongoing question for her, and at this point she doesn't know what the optimal balance of self vs. her kids would have been.
The discussion was capped with a bit of long-awaited rainfall from Hurricane Ike, which we had been expecting all day but turned out to be much less dramatic here in Austin than the meteorologists had been predicting.
(This video was reviewed by Bob McGarey)
Feel free to come and share your own personal insights sometime; the Saturday Night Video and Discussions here in Austin, Texas are a lot of fun and fascinating. (They're free, too.) Here are the questions the group came up with, based on the personal growth themes in the movie: