I AM, and The Great Shake-Up

There’s a time in most everyone’s life where, through an injury like Tom Shadyac’s or mine will be just enough to shake all your ideas about life up until that moment. It will happen to you in one way or another, but how you will proceed after is up to you. I used to volunteer for post brain injury patients, and only a few of them in the first few months of healing will have that great shake-up bulb on. Most still had their blinders on, pushing me to tell them when will they get back to normal and that wore on me signaling time to move on. I would say in a perfect world you walk out of here in two weeks and drive home, but now is when you wake up to what is right here, right now. Few would start thanking nurses and family members for their help as a sign of comprehension. Now, I am not saying I really had anything to do with this, but sometimes patients would hear me talk (yes, I am still “injured”), and understand that their life too, might never be back to normal. Tom takes this as his jumping off point to ask those important questions in the film I AM. He realized that with his healing, that no man is an island.