I just had an interesting conversation with an old buddy of mine. You know how sometimes when you say something to someone else, you learn it yourself? It’s sort of like you knew it, but you realize something new about it when you actually speak it. Well I had that happen to me.

What I realized is that life is a lot like a stage play we’re all forced to act in. Some of us look off stage into the darkness tryng to see something past the glare of the lights, something outside our life. The bigger picture to everything, the world outside. Yet we are unable to because we are on stage and the lights are shining down on us, blinding us from the audience and the outside world. We are forced to be on stage and we cannot leave.

Yet as some of us sit there trying to look off stage and refusing to act, the play goes on around us. We are there, in a state of curiousity looking outword, forgetting the play and our lines. Meanwhile the other characters dance around us and play their part. They are entertaining and get the applause of the audience while we sit and continue to look off stage seeking to see something beyond.

My old buddy that I spoke with is one of those people looking off stage. I have been there many times myself. But I think I came to terms with the fact that I cannot see off stage. I don’t think he has. I think he is still trying to see something.

This is of course all an allegory to thoughts about the big picture of life and existence. You can spend so much time trying to figure it out that you lose sight of living it. I fall into this trap every so often. It never goes anywhere. All it does it hold you back and when you snap yourself back into life you find you have even more catching up to do. You’ve missed lines you were supposed to say and places you were supposed to be. All because you were trying to see something you couldn’t.

That’s pretty much the way I view life lately. You just need to live it because you have no other choice. Looking beyond for something more is only going to keep you from time better spent playing your role whie you are here. Whatever that role may be.

So it is that I used to think that we… the deep thinkers, were the ones that changed the world. We are, so long as we apply that deep thinking to the practical world around us. The play on stage. But when we apply it only to the philosophy of the unknown, we spin in circles, contemplating the unknown beyond the lights to no real end. The unknown which will be unknown. It doesn’t matter which side we take. All that matters is how we appy it to the practical world around us. If we ever do. Perhaps it is that which the unknown is good for. Not for what really is byond the lights, but for how it is we use it to shape our views of the practical world.