Last weekend, I watched the movie named The Shawshank Redemption again, whose feelings were totally different from the first time I watched it when I was 14. I found that I had a deeper understanding of hope and freedom than before.

First of all, I want to talk about hope. In fact, this word is becoming less mentioned in that more people consider it as the "pronoun" of "Poisonous chicken soup". On the contrary, I believe that a person cannot live without hope. Hope is a kind of force, which means that people's living meaningfully needs reasons or desires. In this movie, with hope, Andy spent 19 years digging out a tunnel with a small hammer to escape from the Shawshank. With hope, Andy made the best of his own abilities to fight for the Prisoners' limited rights and spiritual space. With hope, Andy helped Red regain the desire for life, or Red would decide to suicide after being released from the prison. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things and no good thing ever dies.

What the movie wants to express most is freedom. Once one was arrested into the Shawshank, he or she has no rights to own freedom, even to talk about freedom. Worse still, as time goes by, people are being institutionalized. They have no more desires for freedom and cannot be accustomed to a free life. One of the most shocking roles in this movie is Brooks. The life of Brooks profoundly reflected the "institutionalization" of a person's life. After spending most of his life at Shawshank, he was finally released. But once he left the environment and the persons that he was familiar with, he could not feel his value and could not find his place. He regained the freedom of the body, but, in fact, his soul has been killed by Shawshank. In the end he could only choose to disappear from this world full of freedom. These walls are kind of funny like that: first you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passed, so you depend on them. That's institutionalizing.

I guess it comes down to a simple choice: get busy living or get busy dying. How to choose is depending on yourself. At last, I want to end in these sentences from Douglas·MacArthur, General of the Army. "Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair."