My colleague Catri sent this to me (the video embedded below) the other night. My head became overwhelmed while watching it. In the most wonderful way. It felt a lot like a legion of thoughts that wander around my head without a home, all jumped up at the same time and shouted ‘Amen!‘ in that Gospel shouty kind of a way. Thoughts that have kept me at odds with the way the world works, but haven’t been able to gather sufficient momentum on their own to do anything significant about the fact that they don’t fit neatly into the boxes that most of the rest of the world works within.

The first resounding ‘Amen!‘ came with the thought that the universe isn’t going anywhere. Ever! It’s not on a journey from a start to a finish. It just exists. And neither is the planet we call home going anywhere in particular. Each year the Earth circumnavigates our sun, and then it repeats itself. Over and over again. There’s no big arrival point it’s on it’s way to. And yet, when I look around me, I see people hurrying about, trying to get to that place they’ve set a goal to reach. We’re all rushing about, quite literally killing ourselves, to get somewhere on a planet in a universe that’s going nowhere. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Why have we bought into the idea that we must have these goals to arrive at a particular place, on a planet that’s in a universe that’s going nowhere? WTF!

The next ‘Amen!‘ was that the extremely popular and ubiquitous analogy of ‘life as a journey’ isn’t appropriate in any way shape or form. It can’t be. You can’t see life as a journey on a planet that’s in a universe that isn’t going anywhere. Our existence is more accurately analogous to music or dance.

What a liberating thought, that soon began to find some expression as feelings all over my insides.It doesn’t change how I live (not yet), but it releases me from the pressure of arriving, and replaces it instead, with a call from somewhere in the center of the universe to wake up each morning and dance, and play, and make music, and give the very best I can, right now. My arrival doesn’t depend on it, because there isn’t anywhere we’re going.

Enough from me. Watch the video. It’s definitely worth your time. It’s an exert of one of Alan Watts’s lectures (4m28s).

According to Wikipedia:

Alan Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience