Anne Zagursky-Groundhog Day

Profane time
April 15, 2007

In the film Groundhog Day, we are introduced to a man, Phil, who struggles to find the importance of time. He did not seem to value his time or the events of his day and therefore treated eash day with little or no reverence. Phil is sent to Paxatauney, PA to report on the groundhog festival as he had done for the last several years. He did not like the festival or town and did not like doing anything associated with groundhog day. To him it was just another day. He was a weatherman and had predicted that a snowstorm was going to miss the area he was in, but as it turned out, he was wrong. He and his crew are stuck in the small town. Phil is very upset but can really do nothing about it. He gets a room and goes to bed. Phil wakes up and things suddenly seem very familiar. It's groundhog day all over again.

At first, Phil is not at all enthusiastic about his situation and uses the repeated day to build himself up or get rich or make himself look good. He is still living in this idea that time is not precious or sacred. His whole life is profane. At some point in the film, Phil realizes that he is not taking advantage of his free gift. He has the ability to know how the rest of the day turns out. At first he used that knowledge for personal gain or to get the girl to like him, but when he realized what he possessed, he began to use these days to help the people in the town. He saved a kid falling from a tree, helped old ladies, gave back to the community, help the homeless man, and honored the people in town. He didn't do it to make himself look good, but because he saw that he was given a sacred gift. His time was valuable and could be used to help people. When he final made this transformation, he was able to move on with his life and find love.

Just like Phil, we all have problems realizing our time is sacred. Most people spend a large portion of their time doing work to make money, sleeping, or playing. We don't take the time to see how important our lives are and the impact we have on those around us. Phil had a negative effect on the people in the film for the first ten or more repeated days. He hurt them, stole from them, broke their hearts, and put them down. But how many times a day do we do the same kinds of things. We don't think twice about some of the horrible, rude, aweful things we do. If we had the opportunity to look back at the day and do certain things over, I have a feeling most of us would change at least one thing we did during the day. Our time is sacred because today is the only time we have. We aren't promised tomorrow so we need to live like this moment is important and can impact others. Humans don't live in bubbles, we effect others. Our choice to either live in profane time and make no effort to see the beauty and awesome power of the moment or we can live in sacred time and understand that this moment is important and must be treated as such.