Sometimes life forces you to sit down quietly and ponder about it all - life, our purpose here on Earth, the meaning of life, if there even is one and so on. You know, the deep stuff.
The problem is, no matter how much you think about it, there is no one answer. It’s a rabbit hole that you just can’t get out of once you enter. How could one, when there is not a single person who could give you all the answers you seek.
Anyways, that doesn’t stop one from thinking and reading anything related to it that might give them that clarity or even a vague sort of picture to follow.
Recently, I was forced to question everything about life as well and I remembered something I had read in school. It was a poem by William Shakespeare called “All the world’s a stage” from his play “As you like it”. I think this poem provides a great deal of perspective about what life really is.
In the poem, William Shakespeare compares life to a play and the world to a stage which feels so apt, doesn’t it? When we are born, it’s like making our entrance onto the stage and when we die, it is like bowing out of it.
And whatever we do on the stage in between, is life. Just like an actor plays different roles during a play from start to finish, we too play different roles in different stages of life.
Shakespeare says there are seven stages of life: infant, schoolboy, lover, solider, justice, ageing person and then death. Each stage corresponds to the different roles we play. And after we are done, we take our exit.
So, in a way, life really is like a play and everyone on the planet, are actors and there is a beautiful symphony going on even though we are not directly connected to every other person.
One might say then that, if life is just a play then what is the point of it all? We are born, meet so many people, learn so many things, gain so many experiences, and in the end, it all goes away when we go away.
So from that point of view, life might seem pretty non-sensical. But there are other point of views as well. One of them is that, life itself is an experience which we get while we are here.
Another one is that of legacy. And this is something I relate to. I mean life itself seems to centre around passing of all previously accumulated information to be passed down the generations.
And that is where each person and their life comes in. To gather experiences and pass it on to the next. To leave a legacy so that the newer generation can build upon it and grow from that point on.
