I got to thinking about the film The Wizard of Oz recently.

Its’ message is that if we but look, believe and dig deep enough, we all have the heart, brains and courage inside of us to accomplish our dreams.

The movie is also really good at showing us how many nefarious forces and distractions can get in our way to achieving those dreams.

Even when we realize that Dorothy was only having a bizarre dream after being konked in the head in a tornado, the movie’s message of self-belief, perseverance and resisting evil are universal.

As The Cowardly Lion, Tin Man and the Scarecrow learn, the qualities of love, courage and brains we need to move forward in our lives are already inside us.

My current insight and thinking is that we are also the wizards, too. Or we became one. We had to portray a false persona that was more than we actually were just to survive and succeed.

“Faking it ’til we made it, “ we often used to say. That was the way many learned to accomplish our dreams.

Along the highways of Florida, billboard after billboard promotes the seemingly magical powers of lawyers to gain vast sums of money for their clients. these clients have inevitably suffered some misfortune usually in a car accident that was someone else’s fault.

It is the same on Florida TV. Ad after ad after ad with clients expressing their undying gratitude to this lawyer or that for the hundreds of thousands and often millions they gained in compensation thanks to Lawyer Dan.

These ads are smoke and mirrors. Obviously, the ads don’t feature the clients of the lawyer’s losing cases. And so, with every new ad or billboard, the message is drilled into the consciousness of potential future accident victims everywhere.

“Dan’s the man. We don’t worry cause Dan will save us if we get in trouble.”

How desperately people seem to need saviors and heroes. It is a hangover of childhood when Mommy and Daddy constantly hovered around to protect us from every bump and bruise.

It is a hard day when you learn those omnipotent parents were only human beings just like everyone else. They just happened to be the hand we were dealt in the parenting department.

On the threshold of adulthood, we begin to become wizards ourselves, just like Lawyer Dan. We learn to breathe fire and brimstone and promise vengeance and restitution and show the world how big and scary and serious we are.

Moreso when we know we aren’t very big and scary at all. Which explains a lot about bullies.

An advantage of getting older is that we can start to shed the persona we forced ourselves to become to make a living and keep body and soul and likely a family together.

I see it in peers getting older. They are more open and relaxed about a lot of things. Trifles that used to bother them a lot matter less and less. The very fact of being alive becomes a more important priority. Especially as they begin to watch friends leave the planet.

We become wise. We realize that aspects of who we once were in large part concoctions. Just like the wizard of Oz admits his own powerlessness to Dorothy and her friends, we begin to let go of our own camouflage.

It opens a path to living life as who we really are. A gift of aging we are told with which I tend to agree.

So let the potential future car accident victims put their faith in Lawyer Dan and believe he is looking out for them and will have their backs. They will find out soon enough whether their particular fact pattern justifies their faith in the lawyer’s “magical” powers to restore them.

Or Jesus Christ will rise from the grave one more time to save their souls. Or a politician will improve their lives and save them from misery as s/he has promised s/he will.

I much prefer watching the daily drama of life unfold than I did when I was stuck behind the paywall. I can watch from a distance and keep my own counsel.

It has been enough to try to save my own life, let alone the lives of countless other victims. I make no such boast now.

As a young person, like many of those accident victims, I desperately hoped there was a savior out there. It turned out there were no wizards out there qualified to do the job.

As a young person, like many of those accident victims, I desperately hoped there was a savior out there for me.

It would have saved me a tremendous amount of painful work and effort. But that’s the inherent payoff for learning to grow your own self up.

Like the Lion, Scarecrow and Tin Man learned, achieving what you want in life is strictly an inside job.