I watched this movie on my flight from New York to Rome. I almost skipped it — it was an animation film, and I wasn’t sure it was for me. But somewhere over the Atlantic, somewhere between the clouds and the dark, I pressed play.

Soul is technically a children’s film. But it carries a message so honest and so quietly powerful that I think most adults need it more than any child does. Let me walk you through the three moments that stayed with me long after the credits rolled.

Scene 1: Joe Gardner’s Trap

Joe Gardner is a 46-year-old jazz musician and music teacher in New York City. He’s talented. He loves music genuinely and deeply. But somewhere along the way, his love for music got tangled up with something else — the desperate need for the music to prove something.

He needs the big gig. The famous stage. The moment when the world finally confirms that his life was worth living. Until then, he’s just waiting. Everything — his students, his relationships, his daily life — is background noise while he waits for the real thing to begin.

Then the gig happens. He plays. It’s everything he imagined. And backstage afterward, he feels nothing but hollow emptiness.

A cosmic counsellor in the film, named Jerry, had already told him why this would happen — though Joe wasn’t ready to hear it at the time:

“A spark isn’t a soul’s purpose. Oh, you mentors and your passions. Your ‘purposes.’ Your ‘meanings of life.’ So basic.”

Joe had mistaken the hunger for life — the spark — for a destination he needed to reach. He had turned his love for music into a debt he needed the universe to repay. And in doing so, he had stopped being fully present in the music at all.

He was playing toward something. Which meant he was never fully here.

Scene 2: The Fish Who Was Already in the Ocean

After his empty performance, Joe is told a story by the jazz musician Dorothea Williams:

“I heard this story about a fish. He swims up to an older fish and says, ‘I’m trying to find this thing they call the ocean.’ The older fish says, ‘The ocean? That’s what you’re in right now.’ The young fish says, ‘This? This is water. What I want is the ocean.'”

The young fish is not lazy. He’s not unambitious. He desperately wants to find the ocean. But his very desperation — his conviction that the ocean is somewhere ahead of him — is what prevents him from experiencing where he already is.

Joe had been the young fish his whole life. Every small gig, every student who came alive in class, every late night at the piano playing for no one — he had experienced all of these as not yet. Not the real thing. Not the ocean. Just water.

And so the ocean had been all around him, always, and he had never once swum in it.

Scene 3: The Last Box

Near the end of Soul, Joe finds another soul named 22 who has refused to be born for thousands of years. She believes she has nothing to offer. No great purpose. No remarkable talent. No reason to take up space in the world.

Joe reaches her in her darkest moment and tells her the simplest truth in the film:

“That last box fills in when you are ready to live.”

Not ready to be great. Not ready to find your purpose. Just — ready to live. Ready to show up. Ready to be fully present in whatever comes next, without demanding that it prove something first.

22 had thought the last box required a grand calling to fill it. But it had been filling quietly all day — in the way she marvelled at a spinning maple seed, in the way she sat still and listened to a street musician, in the way she tasted pizza for the first time and couldn’t believe something so ordinary could feel so extraordinary.

She was already absorbed. She was already fully here. The spark was already lit.

What the Directors Wanted to Say

Pete Docter, the director of Soul, once said the film grew out of a very personal question he couldn’t stop asking himself: “What are we doing here? What is this all about?”

That question shows in every frame of the film. And after sitting with these three scenes, I think the answer the directors arrived at has two layers — one for children, and one for the rest of us.

For children, the message is gentle and protective. In a world that will very soon start asking them what do you want to be when you grow up — pressing them to pick a lane, find a purpose, justify their existence through achievement — the film whispers something different. You don’t need a grand purpose to deserve your place here. The spark that makes you “you”  is not your talent or your career or your future achievement. It is simply your aliveness. Your curiosity. Your capacity to be amazed by a spinning seed or a slice of pizza or a piece of music heard on a subway platform. That is enough. That has always been enough.

For adults, the message is harder, because most of us are already Joe Gardner. We have already spent years — sometimes decades — treating our lives as a waiting room. Telling ourselves the real life begins after the promotion, after the recognition, after the moment the world finally sees us the way we have always wanted to be seen. The film holds up a mirror and says: look at what you have been swimming past. Look at the ocean you have been standing in, searching the horizon for.

The three scenes build this message like three steps of a staircase.

The first scene shows us the trap: when you turn your passion into a destination, you lose the passion. The music stops being music. The work stops being work. It becomes a vehicle for proof, and vehicles are only valuable for where they take you — not for the journey itself.

The second scene names the trap: you are already in the ocean. The life you are waiting for is the life you are living right now. The students in Joe’s classroom, the small gigs, the late nights at the piano — those were never the waiting room. They were the thing itself.

The third scene offers the way out: stop asking what your life is for, and start asking whether you are ready to live it. The last box — the spark — doesn’t fill in when you find your purpose. It fills in the moment you become fully, openly, presently alive in whatever is in front of you.

The Simplest Way to Say It

You don’t have to be remarkable to deserve your spark.

You don’t have to arrive somewhere before your life becomes real.

You don’t have to prove anything to anyone — not to the world, not to yourself, not to a cosmic counsellor named Jerry — before you are allowed to be fully here.

The ocean is not ahead of you.

You are already swimming.