I also thought the movie had a lot to say about the reality of relationship and the role that love plays.

I found that as an observer to what on the surface was an old-time Hollywood musical, that I wanted the Hollywood la la land ending. I wanted Mia and Sebastian to have it all. I wanted their experience of love not only to inspire and push them in their becoming but to also mean they could be happy ever after, together. But that was not to be. And as you mentioned would have been a mistake for Mia and Sebastian. Timing as the movie so cleverly revealed is everything.

Love it seems, on its highest plane, seems to demand that we become and that relationships are often the crucible in which this is realized. (Even at time the cost of the relationship we might have imagined and hoped/worked for)

After a breakup, I found myself asking the Question “what’s Love got to do with it”? (It being a committed life long relationship). My answer surprised me. Everything and Nothing. Without love relationship is not possible yet even where there is love (even when soul mates) it does not mean that a objective relationship is possible. There are times that we come into each other lives to push each other forward and sometimes fatefully it is the pain of the breakup that is required to wake us up and put us back on our path.

It was recently suggested to me that we are our own soul mates. That in the finding and becoming our authentic self we discover our soul. On the surface as we watch Mia and Sebastian we might have said they were soul mates and in a way they were, but not perhaps as we imagine. Together in that time and space, call it fate, destiny, or perhaps a window of opportunity that was noticed, through the eyes of the other they saw their own souls and became.

I saw the movies La La Land and Collateral Beauty in the same week and to my way of thinking they tell the same story of Love – Love bitter sweet.