Life and Music

In keeping with the spirit of the title, this blog will be less about my personal life (which, being devoid of most kinds of drama and scandal, I'm sure you would find a bit boring) and more about philosophical musings and the like. 

Actually never mind that last bit.

What follows is a transcript of a recording by Alan Watts, a British philosopher, writer, speaker, and student of comparative religion. It is entitled, "Life and Music".

"In music, one doesn't make the END of the composition the POINT of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who play fastest, and there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear the one crashing chord, and that's the end!

But we don't see that as something brought by our education into everyday conduct. We've got a system of schooling that gives a completely different impression. It's all graded. And what we do, is we put the child out into the corridor of this grade system with a kind of, "Come on, kitty kitty kitty kitty!" 

And now you go to kindergarten. And that's a great thing, because once you finish that you 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 gotta go to college, and by jove then you get into graduate school, and when you're through with graduate school you go out to join the world.

And then you get into some racket. Where you're selling insurance. And you've got that quota to make. And you're gonna make that. And all the time, the Thing is coming! It's coming! It's coming! That great Thing, that success you've been working for. Then when you wake up one day about forty years old, and you say,

"My God, I've arrived! I'm there!"

And you don't feel any different from what you always felt. And there's a slight letdown because you feel there's a hoax. And there was a hoax! A dreadful hoax! They made you miss everything! 

If 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 miss the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing, or dance, while the music was being played."

-- Alan Watts

This is an idea I try to incorporate into my life all the time. Everybody has some kind of long-term goal. Move out. Go to college. Travel the world. And most people are quite unhappy with themselves at the moment and are convinced that once they accomplish that Thing everything will be hunky-dory.

There are people studying furiously through high school, college, and law school, giving up the prime years of one's life in order to achieve...what? Nirvana? Heaven? No, a godforsaken corner office at some posh law firm in New York. Just so you can make truckloads of money and retire with ease. It's just not fucking WORTH IT.

These years and the years soon to come are the prime of life. Don't throw them away to fund a mindless obsession over your personal concept of "success".