Ninja inspiration

Yesterday I watched the movie "Ninja Assassin". It is a dark, gory, brutal action flick that does not bring anything really new to the genre. However in the spirit of inspiration everywhere there is something that I noticed. A portion of the movie is a character piece about this young renegade ninja and the force that drove him to betray his clan. We watch as he is trained to be a brutal, emotionless killing machine. There is a little girl who is also being trained as a ninja and as they grow the inevitable happens and they begin to fall in love. She can no longer take the brutality of the place and decides to leave, a crime punishable by death. She asks the main character to go with her but he does not. She is caught and killed. He turns his back on the clan that tried to rob him of emotions and begins his quest for revenge.

The lesson here is not the revenge but instead that no matter what we have learned our entire life we always have the ability to choose which voice we will listen to. No matter how we have lived up to any given point we can say I am done with this or that and start living differently. Is it easy to break with the past? No and this plays out in the movie as the clan tries to hunt down our hero but through struggle and triumph we can make our lives what we want them to be.