Your life is like a magic show. Appearances and disappearances on a stage of misdirection and distraction keep surprising you. You live an unexpected life even as you live in expectation. Don’t be too concerned. It’s like that for all of us. The Bad appears in the midst of the Good, and sometimes the Good appears in the midst of the Bad. And both disappear just as they unexpectedly appear.
Just when each of us learns the secret of one trick, we fall into befuddlement by another. And the trickster, the magician, doesn’t have to be a person. Mother Nature is herself the supreme magician, pulling storms, earthquakes, landslides, eruptions, floods, and fires out of her hat or from behind a dark curtain. Why, She even made a small asteroid explode over Chelyabinsk in 2013, injuring a number of people just minding their own business. Nothing in the clear sky foreshadowed its sudden appearance. She’s good at what she does, playing the same old tricks on every new and unexpecting audience.
You might reconsider how you view the stage on which you live your life. Maybe Shakespeare could have written
Every life’s a magic show
And both the sexes have magicians;
They ply their many misdirections;
And play their tricks in every age….
But, no. He simply put us all in a theater to play out our lives in “seven ages.”
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts….
--As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, Line 138*
In that magic show called life people outdo any trick Mother Nature has. If we think of our lives as part of a magician’s show or if we expect the unexpected as the genre of our lives, we might be less surprised by those sudden appearances and disappearances that so affect our sense of security and alter our plans.
Surrounded by magicians of all kinds, we should consider the old adage “Expect the unexpected” to be good advice. That’s not a call to become anxious. Rather, it’s an admonition that what you anticipate is rarely a problem.
*If you don’t have a copy of the monologue by Jaques, you can find it online.
Just when each of us learns the secret of one trick, we fall into befuddlement by another. And the trickster, the magician, doesn’t have to be a person. Mother Nature is herself the supreme magician, pulling storms, earthquakes, landslides, eruptions, floods, and fires out of her hat or from behind a dark curtain. Why, She even made a small asteroid explode over Chelyabinsk in 2013, injuring a number of people just minding their own business. Nothing in the clear sky foreshadowed its sudden appearance. She’s good at what she does, playing the same old tricks on every new and unexpecting audience.
You might reconsider how you view the stage on which you live your life. Maybe Shakespeare could have written
Every life’s a magic show
And both the sexes have magicians;
They ply their many misdirections;
And play their tricks in every age….
But, no. He simply put us all in a theater to play out our lives in “seven ages.”
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts….
--As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, Line 138*
In that magic show called life people outdo any trick Mother Nature has. If we think of our lives as part of a magician’s show or if we expect the unexpected as the genre of our lives, we might be less surprised by those sudden appearances and disappearances that so affect our sense of security and alter our plans.
Surrounded by magicians of all kinds, we should consider the old adage “Expect the unexpected” to be good advice. That’s not a call to become anxious. Rather, it’s an admonition that what you anticipate is rarely a problem.
*If you don’t have a copy of the monologue by Jaques, you can find it online.
RSS Feed