Come And Play
Here we are presented with a very rare thing — a single life — and as both a species and individuals we seem committed to missing this amazing opportunity. We are surrounded by wonders beyond measure. Bright and colourful flowers put here for our enjoyment, smells, flavours and sights that are so magnificent that even the most lauded poets cannot truly capture their brilliance.
The stars line the firmament just for us, diamonds shining their light simply for our attention. Their furnaces the birthplace of the atoms in our own cells and organs. Even the sun that shines on our face is such a gift that a thousand lifetimes properly spent could not exhaust the pleasure to be gained from this sensation.
We are blessed with emotions and senses, with conscience and being, yet we are intent on squandering all of these remarkable things. We choose instead to be busy, to create trivialities of the humankind to keep us angry, distracted and divided, when we should all be joined together in the celebration of this thing called life.
We would rather go to war and blast our brothers’ bones than sit in awe of the sunset. We would rather hate each other because of the taunts of those who profit from our rage, than come together to listen to the waves as they meet the shore.
From the earliest age we are asked “what do you want to be when you grow up” as if the things we will end up doing to pay the rent need somehow to be part of our identity. If we were to answer that we want to “be” we might be considered an outsider or somehow strange, as if mastery of “being” was not a reasonable approach to this short time that we have here.
Every day we are gifted with the biggest fireworks display in the history of the universe, in a limitless sea of possibilities. Yet we spend our time seeking and creating limitations to our own limitlessness, becoming blinkered by spreadsheets and the rolling news cycle.
We are hurtling through space at more than 1.3 million miles per hour, pulled around a by Great Attractor whose gravity sends our galaxy and solar system spinning in a chaotic cosmic dance. Look up and the sun smiles down on us, sending its light to grow the plants that nourish us, warming the water for us to bathe. We are literally made of stardust and sunbeams.
Look down and see that we are standing on a rock abundant with life in a near lifeless universe, spinning around a burning ball of hydrogen — our home. As Carl Sagan reminded us, this is home to all who we’ve ever met, all who have ever lived. Every author, poet, inventor, thinker. The entirety of humankind, and its history, contained on this tiny pebble. Look.
But we don’t look.
Instead we’re glued to our screens, pecking away at our keyboards like battery hens. Row after row of us, our focus pulled away, into social media, emails, next day delivery, and buy one get one free.
Our schoolchildren get scolded for looking out of the window, even though that’s where life is. But no, learn to focus where the money is. Where the system is. Where our manmade construct is. And where the infinite isn’t. Because that’s what we’ve made of this one, delicate and special life. These frivolities of distraction are our crowning glory.
Yet it’s our children who really know. They should be teaching us. Unencumbered by a lifetime of trauma and tragedy, of politics, distraction and manipulation, they arrive here knowing all they need to know. And then we spend the next twenty years trying to bury it. And another two decades later we find ourselves desperately trying to get it back, unaware that we’ve had it with us all along.
Krishnamurti said “it’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”, yet we try and try and try, only to find ourselves misaligned with ourselves. And then we try and try and try to realign with who we really are. Yet all we need to do is look back, and see who we came here to be.
We were invited here to dance. The music has been playing for billions of years, just waiting for us to make our entrance and shuffle a jig around the dancefloor. Why must we find so many reasons to turn away from the light and create a darkness to bury ourselves in.
Come and dance, and breathe, and play and be in awe. Find your tune and let it carry you. That’s what all of this is for.