I’m sure that everyone knows the proverbial line by Shakespeare that “All the worlds a stage…” I finally got around to reading some of my friends’ blogs and I’ve realized that my world has somehow transformed itself from being an active spectacle of time well spent to being a dry hump of a script that any critic would spit at. My stage no longer performs. There are no actors on it. Any that do appear come borrowed from other sets where the director has told them to take a break in their 15 minutes of fame. My own mind has framed a theater of empty seats around the world’s stages, watching from the sidelines the wonderment of life that I could take part in, but am not brave enough to try. In part, I have grown distant from any affiliations that I once enjoyed. Most of that distance is my fault. I say that I have no time, but if I had really wanted to do more, I would find the time. I have grown lazy and apathetic, like much of what I see around me. I see my friends moving on and I am happy for them. Each of their lives is like the movies I watch…they have a beginning, a middle, and hopefully, much later, an ending, a spectacular ending, full of comedy and drama. I sit in that empty theater watching these movies, and when they end, I will be left with nothing but empty empathy because I know very little of the experiences that they have gone through. When did my life become so stagnant? I don’t know. I honestly cannot say when I walked off my own stage and sat down and just have never gotten out of that seat I have grown comfortable with.
Some people would say to jump in and try it all, that life is not life without risk. Some people say that life is good, do what you have always done. Some are as apathetic as I and say to choose for myself. Sometimes I think that I will never make the choice. Most of the time, I believe that I have already made the choice.
This may sound cliché, but I am not a fighter. I am more the “please don’t hurt me, but I’d like to play anyway” type of person. That theater seat that I have grown so comfortable with is also my writing chair, my thinking palette, a delicacy of observable sensory bliss. I have chosen to take that seat and from it I know my boundaries yet I see the endless possibilities. Sometimes I wish I was part of those possibilities, but my part is not to be a part, but to watch, to listen, to record those beginnings, middles, and endings. At least, that is the part I choose to play now. Maybe that is the chickenshit way out of being an active participant in the world around me. But, that chair is hard to get out of. And, in writing this cathartic piece, I find that what I would have considered bullshit in the above words sounds just right. For once, I feel very relieved as I write. I have not found an answer and there are probably more questions that have derived from this session than anything else, but at least there is something.
In Don Quixote, Cervantez wrote: “There is a time for some things, and a time for all things; a time for great things, and a time for small things.” In the last couple of years, my life and time has been set on certain things, mainly work. Now that I have my job and am pretty secure in it, I find that I am philosophizing about my time. Maybe it is time for a change, time for “some things” to be come “some things” else. My focus must change soon. But, I have yet to figure out where that focus will take me and I fear I am following the blind path. These musings make me ponder even more what my future might hold. I hope that I find what I am looking for before fate plucks me from my seat in that empty theater, puts me back on stage, and asks me to perform the “finale” before I am ready.
Philip Massinger wrote: “Death hath a thousand doors to let out life.” I hope that my exit door lets me out with a proverbial bang!