Life is music, not maths
Jeroen
Not all those who wander are lostNetherlands Veteran
I came across this Alan Watts quote today, and thought it was unusually insightful even for him. That life is an art, not a precise problem to be solved is one of those key realisations which you may come across when you’re forty, and which make you think, I wish I knew and appreciated that when I was twenty.
When I was young, I approached life precisely as a series of problems to be solved. What do we want? Financial independence. Girlfriends. Fun. Right, how do we go about getting it… Goal-oriented living to a T. Nowadays it strikes me that that is very foolish. Often real living is more about improvisation, and not taking life too seriously.
If you consider, when you are improvising music with a group of musicians, you are generally looking to make the music better, more harmonious. Not many people live their lives like that, many instead are looking for personal gain, status, fame.
Comments
Maybe its a bit of both. If you want to be a really good musician you need to learn scales and chords and be diligent about practicing. But after you get the fundamentals down, being good really becomes more about taking what you know and being open, creative and spontaneous with it. As a child I would find a piano and be spontaneous and creative, but it was just a bunch of noise.
Life is an improvised dance to Mother Nature's song
Life is music. And music is elegant math.
It's music to our ears
Nice video, @shoshin1… I like the way it shows the rhythms of their way of living
I am drawn to answer like this:
Sometimes life seems to me like music. I dance effortlesly and well. All is well.
But sometimes my dance seems contrived or poor. And the music seems out of tune.
Sometimes life seems to me like maths. Things seem clear and undisguised. All is well.
But sometimes my mind becomes too burdened with this or that impediment. And then things seem complicated and life hard.