We like to think of our lives as a journey that has some serious purpose at it’s end. “Success”, or retirement, or heaven, or…
It causes us to think of the here and now – the only time we have and will ever know – as something that’s never quite right… an obstacle that we need to overcome in order to get to that better future moment.
We plan. We worry. We wait. For what? All that’s waiting for us at the end of our journey to success, or whatever, is the discovery that nothing has changed.
At least that’s what happened to me. I woke up one day, looked around and saw I had all the shit I’d been questing after. Cars. A big house. A fair bit of cash. Even a sixty inch tv! And… outside of the fact that I was twenty years older, nothing had changed. I wasn’t enlightened. I had no sensation of “making it”. Quite the contrary… the feeling I had was more like… that’s it?
But did I let that stop me? No siree bob… my old man didn’t raise a quitter. I was a producer. And I had a plan. I tracked my lack of contentment to my tv… or maybe it was my clothes. Whatever, my tv was for sure too small and so it was as good a place to start as any. Happily enough an eighty inch, curved panel tv had just hit the market. So I doubled down on my effort and set out to get me one.
The ego is NEVER satisfied. The wanting never ends.
Then Malia had a cardiac arrest. She was only thirty-nine! This wasn’t supposed to happen till I was richer… a lot richer, and had her thirty year old replacements all lined up. (What? Replacements… plural? Oh come on, it will obviously take more than one to fill the gap left by someone as spectacular as Malia.)
But that’s not the way it works. We almost never see what’s coming and… therefore quite logically can’t plan for it. And as Malia lay there on the floor… dying… the playbook of life fell open for me.
I could so plainly see how wrong I’d been. Life isn’t a journey. It’s more like a musical, and we’re supposed to play and dance and sing for as long as the music plays.