Tonight the movie was exceptionally long, the longest we have ever had, which left very little time for a discussion afterwards. But we persevered and came up with some very good questions in a short amount of time. We started by listing the major themes in Question 1, and then devising full-fledged questions on the remaining items.
Most of our time was spent on Question 5. We discussed our definitions for the word "regret" and found that we have several that don't necessarily match. From one person's story about the regret she felt as a 10 year old who knew better than to cave in to peer pressure but did anyway, to another participant's tale about her parent dying before she could deal with the reality of it all, we ran the gauntlet with some rather uncomfortable (but very informative) memories.
To end the night on a high note, we finished up with Question 7. Someone talked about how they had made a passing remark and found out decades later that it had changed someone's life. Someone else described seeing a person smiling at him across the street, and emphasized that he never talked to the person or saw him again but that he still remembers its effect on him thirty years later.
We decided that there are probably many times that we affect others but don't know it. Someone quoted Hugh Lynn Cayce as saying that "at every moment, we are either healing others or killing them." It seems like all of us, in some way or another, have probably touched others whether we know it or not. To wrap up the topic (and the evening), one of our members said, "I just want people to be real, real nice. And don't piss me off! But be real."