Nothing to be Done

Drama is a beautiful subject and you have to be truly passionate about it to do it. The most beautiful thing about it, is that it isn't just a subject. It is something you take out of the classroom and into your life. It enriches you with the kind of knowledge that allows you to form deeper levels of thinking. You engage yourself in so much more, emotionally, spiritually and psychologically.

The play we have just finished reading is called Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. It has completely blown my mind and changed my view on life in a way that I will never wish to remember my state of mind before this because it was too simple. It is not often that this happens. It's complicated so I ask you to bear with me. The setting of the play is unspecified. The stage is bare, apart from a tree which is placed center stage on a mound of dirt. The stage is divided into two symmetrical halves and so is the audience. An imaginary road runs through the middle of the audience and out into the middle of nowhere. There are only four characters: Vladimir, Estragon, Pozza and Lucky. Vladimir and Estragon have an intensified co-dependent relationship - another subject that I can become very passionate about.

The play revolves around the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, and their hopeless waiting for Godot to arrive, for what reason we don't know and is never said. One's first thought is that it is a religious play and that Godot is perhaps God. He is not. Beckett says that if he meant for him to be God, he would have said "God". Beckett says that if he knew who Godot was at all, he would have said who he was.
This is the part that made me fall in love with this play: Godot is that thing in life that everyone is waiting for but never comes.

There is a quotation in the play, said by Pozzo, "they give birth astride of the grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." This is the second message given that made me fall in deeper in love with the play. What Beckett is saying here is that life seems an eternity to us, but it is merely a split second in cosmic time.

I have a thing about death - a big thing. If I think about it too hard I feel cold at the very core of myself and I can't move until I stop thinking about it. We all know that we are going to die. The problem is that no one can actually grasp the concept of death because it is nothing we can imagine or experience in any way until it actually happens. I have never broken my arm and can be afraid of doing so in the future, but I have felt physical pain before and so I can imagine what it would be like to break a bone in my body - but there is nothing comparable with death and thus, one cannot grasp its concept in any such way.

There is a poem I studied in English called Death Be Not Proud by John Donne. At the time, it allowed me the sense of accepting the idea of death and being okay with it. A couple of years on, my views have changed. "From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee" - a line in the poem in which the poet is asking death why he is so proud, when rest and sleep are merely miniature versions of him, and bring people joy? I fully understand the idea of that line, and yes, sleep may be like death in the sense we are unconscious but we will eventually wake up when our alarm clock goes off and we will get on with our day. But death? There is nothing like it. When I die, I will die. I will not dream. I will not wake up. I will not see the world again. I will not be able to use any of my senses again. Life will go on and I will eventually be forgotten. I cannot stop this from happening. It is going to happen and that scares me more than anything else.

I've been thinking about this a lot, what with reading Waiting For Godot every day, and also for the fact that I've been enjoying my life. That sounds like a very run-of-the-mill thing to say, but it's true. I have yet to blog about the weekend that has just come and gone - a weekend I thoroughly enjoyed because I experienced many news things and did things I would not usually do on an average weekend. These two factors (Waiting for Godot and my extraordinary weekend) have made me realise how absurd certain things can be in the sense that I may ask myself why I spend my time worrying about this or that, because at the end of the day, does any of it matter? It makes you realise how small your issues are and how senseless it is to waste time on them. There is a huge world out there that you are probably never gonna see half of. There are going to be things you have never done and one day, you will die not having done most of them, or maybe you will - that is not in anyone's control but your own.

The things you want to do? Do them. Stop waiting for Godot. Stop being unhappy with the life you have and the things and people that fill it. Stop making excuses. Stop waiting for the "right moment" to do things. The right moment is never going to come because it does not exist. The world is literally laying at your feet and it's just waiting for you to take it and own it - make it yours.