A very famous playwright coined this idea many years ago;
All the world is a stage
and all the men and women merely players,
Each has his entrances and his exits,
A friend of mine, who lived alone, wanted to move house. The reason was that one of her neighbours had lost her husband. Maybe her friend would now sell up and move away. The pond in which she swam was now missing a fish and more might go. Soon it would be empty. Moving house and finding new friends seemed a good idea.
I suggested that moving house may not solve the problem. I proposed that our lives consist of three things. The ‘scenery’, the ‘actors’ and the ‘story’. Each is as important as the other and all are fundamental to enjoying life. Merely changing the scenery will not necessarily invite new characters and a new story.
For example, foreign holidays are popular with many people. It’s a way of packing up and ‘leaving everything behind’. As I once overheard a man say in the queue for passports about his holiday, ‘you have to get away from staring at the same four walls.’
The backdrops to our lives do become visually repetitive.
‘Either this wallpaper goes or I do!’ – Oscar Wilde
Even the daily journey to work becomes an extension of the wallpaper and we begin to detest it, whether it is the inside of a car or private Lear Jet. So the simplistic solution we take is to change it; even if only for a couple of weeks each year. Off we go to the Balearic’s with all our ‘bare necessities’ in a suitcase or three, our beloved partner and a smile of expectation. Expectation because you know the hotel; you should do…it’s been your holiday destination for the last fifteen years.
For some, this is all the scenery change they can handle. There is comfort when they know what to expect. They know where their favourite restaurant is, the best bars. Some vacationers are more adventurous in their scenery choice. They go to different hotels each year or even different countries. If you have enough money, today the sky is no longer the limit. You can ‘Spacecation’.
But again, life or rather our expectations of life, let us down. After two weeks we are bored walk of the beach and the frog in the shower and the hotel mini bus that is always full. We begin to long for home.
Going abroad has not even changed the people in our lives, unless we were lucky enough to find a ‘holiday romance’ or get the phone number of the ‘nice couple we met on the plane’. We went with the wife or husband and we return with the wife or husband. The rows on the hotel balcony pushed down into the suitcase of our mind, strapped up and locked away until another time.
It is easy to change the scenery but changing the characters, that is something different. Families are by definition almost, designed to stay together whatever happens. They are our insurance policy to support us through whatever troubles life brings. Families do break up but it is better they do not.
Friends are great but from the day we are capsized out of Junior School, we realise friends we love, disappear. Only the very best of friendships will sustain you through all of your tempests and becalments.
And the world of work will treat us with more indifference than is good for us. If there is a reason why the company needs to cut staff, then the company comes before your mortgage repayments. You are out.
The characters in our life are born and pass away before our eyes, sometimes quite literally. We become resigned to the phases of life. When we are young new characters keep appearing. They amuse and delight us and then are gone.
When we are old, the characters who we have held dear, fall off the calendar until we are left alone and awaiting our cue to exit, stage left or right.
And as if this warp and weft of life is not complexity enough there is the third dimension, and the one which troubles or delights us most; the story.
Think back to your favourite movie. Whilst you will remember some of the backdrops to the scenes, some of the performances and appearances of the actors, it is the story which holds fast in your memory. Human beings are hard wired to remember stories as we do melodies.
We spend our childhoods dreaming of what we are going to become; explorers, pilots, politicians, film stars! The stories we aspire to are almost always unrealistic. That is after all, the nature of dreams is;
” If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:…’
from ‘Midsummer Nights Dream’ epilogue, William Shakespeare
We watch one or two grown ups who have been in the right scene at the right time with the right character and have been given an opportunity to reach for a goal they never dreamed would come. It did, which makes the rest of us think our ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ will come to us to. Perhaps it will.
But the movie in which you have the staring role, is not remotely likely to bring you fame. Be it ever so humble, we should not be ashamed of an uneventful life. While we are responsible for how we respond to opportunities in life, we are not responsible for the ‘hard knocks’, false starts, mirages, tricksters, fraudsters, liers, cheats, charlatans, and ‘low ballers’ that knock us off our feet.
Two dimensional life is just about management. Holidays are fun. But when you add the third dimension of a narrative, you had better be ready to run. And remember, like Tom and Jerry, the wallpaper of life is on a very very very long roll.
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