I watched this film once a long time ago. My dad told my sister and I that it was one of his favorites and that it was funny. I remember it not being funny. However, I went back and watched it for this extra credit blog post and now, probably five years later, I can see my dad had a point. I really enjoyed this movie because he had a lot of lessons when it came to living life.

I think often times we as people get into a schedule of life. We wake up everyday at a specific time go to work/school, come home, have dinner, do homework/work, go to sleep and repeat again. We get into a “groundhog day” rut. I heard a speech once and it talked about the way we idolize the weekends because those are the days we can do something fun and different. However, after watching this movie, I see now that you only have one life, live each day a little different. The character Phil in the movie, everyday learned something new that he had to fix the next day. We can take that lesson into our every day lives: learn something new for tomorrow.

This movie also captures life during the pandemic. Especially in the beginning when school was cancelled for two weeks, I felt like time did not exist. At first it was nice to have a break from life, but after a couple days of not being able to leave the house, a dream soon turned into a nightmare. I remember getting excited when I had a planned zoom or facetime call with friends or family because it was something different to spice up my day. I mean even now, a year later, I feel like I am in a “groundhog day” rut. I go to classes every day, after classes I go to work, come home, eat dinner, go to bed. I am going to take the lesson from the movie of doing something different everyday with me into summer and next school year.

Looking at what Jeremy Engels wrote in his reflection, I appreciate his writings on mindfulness. He describes it as getting to know yourself and circumstances. I think it is beneficial to be mindful of yourself and how you feel. I know for myself, I try to push myself so hard with school and extracurriculars that often times I forget about my own health and happiness. This past year with the pandemic, I have worked hard to be more mindful of myself and what I need when overwhelmed with school and activity things. In high school, we would have mindfulness Mondays where every week we would do something different to become more mindful. We would meditate, do yoga, journal, listen to music, one time the school even got therapy dogs to come in and we could go pet the dogs and relax. Mindfulness is very important and that is just another life lesson the movie Groundhog Days teaches us.