Alan Watts

From Coincidence of Opposites

"In music, though, one doesn't make the end of a composition. The point of the composition is not to get to the end of the composition. If that were so the best composers would be the ones that got to the end the fastest. And there would be composers who only wrote finales. People would go to the concert just to hear one crashing chord. Cause that's the end. Same as dancing. You don't aim at a particular spot in the room where you should arrive. The whole point of dancing is the dance.

But we don't see that as something brought on by our education in our everyday conduct. We've got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It's all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system. And then you start off kindergarten, and that's a great thing because you get into first grade. And then common, first grade leads into second grade and so on, and then you get out of grade school and you've got high school. And its revving up. The thing is coming. Then you've got to go to college, and hopefully you go to graduate school. And when you're through with graduate school you go out to join the world. And then you get into some racket where you're selling insurance. And they've got that quota to make and you've gotta make that. And all that time the thing is coming. Its coming, that great thing, that success you've been working for. Then one day you wake up about 40 years old and you say, "my god, I've arrived! I'm there!" And you don't feel very different from what you always felt. And there's a slight let down because you feel it was a hoax. And it was a hoax, a dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything. By expectation there are the people who lived to retire, and put those savings away. And then when they're sixty five they don't have any energy left. It feels like we've cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was, to get to that end, success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after your dead. But we missed the whole point all the way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing...or to dance while the music was being played."