Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 88 - So It Goes
Welcome to Issue 88 of Deep Life Reflections, where I share five things I’ve been enjoying and thinking about over the past week. Welcome also to new subscribers.
This week we explore the theme of processing trauma through two acclaimed works. We start with Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, an anti-war novel born from his struggle to articulate the devastation he witnessed in Dresden—a task that took him two decades to complete. We then shift to a different kind of grief in Pedro Almodóvar’s Oscar-winning film, All About My Mother, a tribute to women and the enduring strength of motherhood in all its forms. We also reflect on the resilience of the carob tree, a symbol of how we can cultivate strength, connection, and the capacity to thrive over time.
Join me as we explore this week’s Friday Five.
1. What I’m Reading
Slaughterhouse Five (1969). By Kurt Vonnegut.
“The great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.” – George Saunders.
I first read Slaughterhouse-Five in university thirty years ago. This month, I returned for a second reading with a special 50th anniversary edition. I enjoyed it much more the second time round—an extra three decades on the planet does wonders. The novel is regarded as one of the most powerful anti-war books written. It’s based on Vonnegut’s own experience as a young American soldier called up to fight in the tail-end of World War II in Germany.
Captured and held as a prisoner of war, Vonnegut witnessed the 1945 Allied fire-bombing of Dresden in east Germany, reducing the once beautiful city to a pile of rubble and taking thousands of civilian lives. Vonnegut knew he had to write about Dresden and spent years trying. But each time the words wouldn’t come—and when they did, they weren’t the right ones. The edition I have includes some of those early drafts, with various words and sentences scrawled out and new words scribbled in. When the right words finally came, they formed Slaughterhouse-Five, a surreal, dark, imaginative, comedic, and compassionate take on the bleakness and senselessness of war, as well as a broader commentary on society.
The book revolves around Billy Pilgrim, an unremarkable American optometrist who is jumping around in time, reliving splintered moments of his life, from his experiences as a soldier in Dresden to his post-war suburban existence. This non-linear surreal structure mirrors the fractured nature of trauma itself. Billy is also abducted by aliens and taken to the planet Tralfamadore, where he learns their philosophy: time is not linear, and all moments in life—past, present and future—exist simultaneously. For the Tralfamadorians, death is just an illusion: When a person dies, they only appear to die. They are still very much alive in the past.
Vonnegut conjures up the bizarre world of Tralfamadore as a symbol for the fantasy of a utopian world devoid of sadness, emotion and purpose. It represents both an escape from pain and the numbness that comes with avoiding it. It’s telling that Billy is as happy there as he is on earth.
Throughout the novel, Vonnegut uses the phrase, “So it goes”, which appears after every mention of death or suffering—it’s used 106 times. While we might perceive this phrase as the equivalent of verbally shrugging our shoulders and accepting what life gives us, in Slaughterhouse Five “So it goes” is not a way of accepting life, but rather of facing death.
The novel is laced with dark ironies. One of the most striking is how Billy survives the bombing of Dresden inside a slaughterhouse (slaughterhouse number five, where the novel takes its name)—a place where animals are killed—while those outside of the slaughterhouse are, in fact, the ones slaughtered. The brilliance of the novel is the way Vonnegut confronts these horrors with humour and humanity.
Dresden was rebuilt twice: immediately after the war and in the early 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Vonnegut died in 2007. A letter to a fellow veteran in 2001 revealed Vonnegut was still processing the Dresden atrocity in the years before he died. In the letter he wrote that “‘Billy Pilgrim’ was a young man called Edward Krone, a sophomore in engineering when he was drafted. He starved himself to death. He never should have been in the army.”
So it goes.
2. What I’m Watching
All About My Mother (1999). Directed by Pedro Almodóvar.
All About My Mother is a story about four extraordinary women, each trying to come to terms with loss, love, identity, and acceptance. It’s written and directed by the great Spanish filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar, and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. It’s a fantastic showcase of the ‘Almodóvar style’—a dark Greek tragedy lit up by humour, wit, and warmth, with bold colours, glossy decors and ingenious camera shots. This is a film of huge substance, one that lingers long after the closing credits.
Manuela is a medical worker and single mother to a teenage son, Esteban. Esteban has never known the identity of his father—all the photos at home are torn in half, erasing the father from existence. On Esteban’s seventeenth birthday, Manuela takes him to see a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, a play that subtly foreshadows the film’s themes of loss and identity. After the play, Esteban is tragically killed in a hit-and-run accident while trying to get an autograph from his favorite actress. Devastated by her loss, Manuela journeys to Barcelona to seek out and inform Esteban’s father of his death.
Once in Barcelona, Manuela meets her old friend Agrado, a trans woman whose vibrancy, self-awareness, and comic humour provide a counterweight to Manuela’s grief. Agrado is all survival and being true to herself. In one of the film’s best scenes, Agrado takes an empty stage and improvises a humorous monologue around the story of her life, listing all the plastic surgeries—and the pain and costs—that helped her journey from male to female. She is comfortable with who she is and seems to be implying, “I’ve paid my dues to be who I am today. Have you?” As one critic put it, “Manuela is the heroine of the film and its centre, but Agrado is the source of life.”
Manuela also forms deep connections with two other women. Huma, the famous yet neurotic actress from A Streetcar Named Desire, becomes a close confidant, while Rosa, a young nun working with battered prostitutes, brings another dimension to Manuela’s journey. Through these relationships, Manuela channels her grief into becoming a surrogate mother to those around her. In doing so, the film examines the strength of the female universe and the importance of motherhood in its many forms.
That Almodóvar has written these characters with such depth, sincerity and realism is reflective of the respect and admiration he has for the women who have shaped his own life. Indeed, the film ends with a special dedication to his own mother and other women who inspired him.
All four characters stand outside conventional society and its norms, whether through their gender, sexuality, situation or status. By focusing on characters who cross societal boundaries, Almodóvar celebrates the complexity, strength, and humanity of those often overlooked. Paradoxically the film reaffirms the role of family values—understanding, acceptance, and unequivocal support—and shows that families can be where you find them and where you make them.
Compassion transcends all.
3. What I’m Contemplating
Both works this week deal with processing trauma and the different ways that can be approached. Kurt Vonnegut used his skill as a writer to confront the terrible sights he witnessed in Dresden in the days after the city was levelled. It became so important to him that it took two decades to find the right words and the right story. It’s ironic that Slaughterhouse-Five doesn’t even cover the bombing itself—it doesn’t need to. Vonnegut’s words already capture the emotional toll, highlighting that some experiences are just too big to confine to a single moment.
In All About My Mother, there is a different kind of grief: a mother losing their son. Manuela takes on the role of a surrogate mother, helping others to process her pain and loss, and rediscovering her sense of connection and usefulness. Through her relationships, the film builds layers of motherhood, identity and chosen families, showing that healing comes not from isolation but community.
Both works remind us that healing and resilience are rarely solitary endeavours. They emerge through connection—to others, to time, and to the stories we tell ourselves. Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim connects to the Tralfamadores and their non-linear view of time, while Almodóvar’s Manuela finds solace in the women she helps and the bonds they create.
This week, I gave a talk to my former company, Dell Technologies, called ‘Resilience by Design,’ offering three practical strategies for developing everyday resilience. The third of these strategies is People: The Power of Community. We thrive through our connections with others, and our social bonds are essential to our health and happiness. To illustrate this, I used the example of the carob tree, a plant native to the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
The carob tree takes years to bear fruit but lasts for generations, providing ongoing strength and resilience. Relationships, just like these carob trees, are investments in our long-term health and happiness, and help us cultivate resilience by tapping into our natural ability to connect, support and learn from each other. That whatever challenges we face, we are never truly alone.
4. A Quote to note
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
- Maya Angelou
5. A Question for you
If you could rewrite a painful moment in your life as a story, how would you reframe it to reveal your growth, strength, and dignity?
Thanks for reading and being part of the Deep Life Journey community. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment. Have a great weekend.
James
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