Last year I went to Cirque du Soleil as a part of a University program. I watched the acrobats risk their lives as they cavorted around on tightropes and the aptly named “Wheel of Death.” I, and the rest of the audience, couldn’t help but cringe at some of the more incredible feats and seemingly close calls.
Even if you’ve never seen the Cirque, I think that we feel the same way, even if it is to a lesser degree, about any live performance … from juggling to theatre to athletics. In every one of these forms of entertainment, unlike the pre-recorded and completed presentations that are movies, albums, and even books, there is always an underlying possibility of making a mistake.
A live performance has a chance of not being perfect. It’s not a movie; you don’t get to reshoot a misstep, mistake, missed throw, or missed note. In fact, a performance’s glory is in the fact that it won’t go perfectly, but will continue nonetheless.
Life’s glory is in that it doesn’t go perfectly. Or, perhaps more accurately, its glory is in the fact that it doesn’t go according to our preconceived plan. It isn’t a package deal that you can pick up, read along with, and then conclude having tied all the threads together at the end.
There is an element of creation, of chance, of unknown in our life. Sometimes we feel it more distinctly and call it an adventure or an excitement or a “break” from the norm. But more than that, uncertainty makes life livable.
Life, reduced to predictable, repetitious, and certain elements and outcomes is like reading the same book or watching the same movie over and over again. No matter how good it is, there are so many more things that can be experienced, thought, and known.
There is more to life than our attempt to reduce it to the predictable. Sometimes we become too fixated on constructing brackets that contain our life.
Don’t get me wrong; you should definitely live with consistency. But this consistency is founded on working through uncertainty and our mistakes, rather than the removal of any deviation from some plan or preconceived story.
Ever wonder why so many actors and celebrities are miserable at love and relationships? I think it may come down to the fact that when they try to apply living out a rote characterization or a storybook ending to their real lives, it inevitably falls apart.
So in the end, appreciate the juggler more than the book about juggling. Appreciate the theatre more than the movies. Appreciate a singer more than your iPod, because they have grasped a part of life itself. We will not act perfectly nor will life be perfect. There is always a chance of messing up and we undoubtedly will.
But at the curtain call, you will have lived a fuller and more meaningful for having recognized it’s necessary limitations, rather than trying to make it reflect a movie or a book.
Life will never be certain, but it can be good.
Originally published in the Willamette Collegian.