What a game, what a life
They say you don’t know what you have until it's gone. But how can you know what you have before it's gone?
One way is to imagine it being gone. One exercise for imagining this is imagining dying. When you die, everything is gone. No more moving your body. No more seeing trees and skylines. No more tasting food. No more smelling flowers.
And that's just all the good stuff. Sometimes when I imagine dying, I even start to miss the bad stuff. I imagine I might even miss feeling pain, just to feel something. To me, it seems like anything at all is better than nothing.
We have so much. Just thinking about being alive is crazy. We get so focused on our identities and our to-do lists and we forget how crazy it is that you can just put a chair in the middle of a room and sit down and see the room around you. Feel the air blowing from the fan, feel the chair under your legs and the floor under your feet. Even closing your eyes, you can feel inside your body. Even without the external world, there are endless feelings to explore inside of yourself.
I've tried several times to express what I'm trying to communicate here and I never quite get it. It's the feeling of awe when sensing anything in this world. We commonly feel awe with regard to sunsets and mountains and other majestic and magnificent things. But I sometimes feel awe just for the white wall of a room or a cup in the cabinet. These things have shapes and they stay that way. And we can experience it all in so many different ways with our senses.
I believe the senses are the basis for art. Each art form is enjoyed by certain of our senses. The culinary arts are enjoyed by our taste. Visual arts are enjoyed by our eyes. Music is enjoyed by our ears. I might even go so far as to say thinking and feeling are also separate senses. Perhaps thinking is the sense with which we experience written word. Alas, I'm getting off on this theory about sense perception and art.
The point I was making before is that every single thing in this world is awe inspiring, if you really stop to consider it.
I think the order of the universe is important too. Things don't just happen randomly. If things happened randomly, then it would be hard to play the game. There would be no rules. You would move one piece to one spot and turn around and turn back again and the piece would have moved on its own. It would be hard to play a game like that.
Sometimes the pieces do move on their own, but we at least think we understand it. We think we understand the cause and effect in the universe and why pieces move. And so even when pieces move without us doing it ourselves, we still have a sense that the pieces are playing by the rules. And there's just something fun about that.
There's a game here to be played. We all got a ticket for free. It all starts from just that moment of sitting still and letting your senses play the movie for you. It's art all the time. We think we have to go to the theaters to see a movie, but the movie is always playing. You can sit down wherever you are and watch the movie play. You don't even have to sit down. You can stand or run or lie down or dance around or skip.
So much, all the time. So much, all the time. How little of it I actually pay attention to. How much goes unnoticed. What a game, what a life. Thank you, Game Master. Thank you.