Alan Watts’ words making us think…
Existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere. That is to say it doesn’t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. But that it is best understood by analogy with music. Because music, as an art form, is essentially playful, we say you play the piano. You don’t work the piano. Why?
Music differs from say, travel. When you travel, you are trying to get somewhere. In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that was so the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to a concert just to hear one crackling chord, because that’s the end! Same when dancing, you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room for where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.
Now, but we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We’ve got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It’s all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system, with a kind of come on, kitty, kitty, kitty and now you go to kindergarten, you know, and that’s a great thing because when you finish that you’ll get into first grade. And then come on, first grade leads to second grade and so on and then you get out of grade school and you go to high school and it’s revving up, the thing is coming.
Then you’re gonna go to college and by Jove then you get into graduate school and when you’re through with graduate school, you’ll go out to join the world. And then you’ll get into some racket where you are selling insurance and they’ve got that quota to make and you’re going to make that. And all the time that thing is coming, it’s coming, it’s coming that great thing, the success you’re working for.
Then when you wake up one day about forty years old, you’ll say, my God I’ve arrived. I’m there! And you don’t feel very different from what you’ve always felt. Look at the people who live to retire and put those savings away. And then when they’re 65, they don’t have any energy left, they’re more or less impotent and they go and rot in an on old people’s senior citizens community.
We’ve simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. And we thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is or maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.