I have discovered Alan Watts a few days ago and since then I have been going through the Youtube videos with his lectures. I like his way of putting things into words, it's a pleasure to listen and to think about his ideas. Here's one of my favorites that could be resumed to one simple idea: carpe diem!

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/embed/29atSZKbmS4[/embed]

I have tried to make a transcript of this video, couldn't grasp a couple of words, sorry for that!

My contention, my personal opinion, this is my basic metaphysical axiom, shall we put it that way. The existence, the physical universe is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn't going anywhere, that is to say that it doesn't have some destination that he ought to arrive at. So then, in music though, one doesn't make the end of a composition, the point of the composition. If that was so, the best of the conductors were those who played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to the concerts just to hear a crashing chord, 'cause that's the end. Say when dancing, you don't aim at a particular spot in the room, that's where you should arrive, the whole point of the dancing is the dance. Now, but we don't see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We got a system of schooling that gives a completely different impression. It's all graded. And what we do is, we put the child in the corridor of this great system, with a kind of 'Come one, kitty, kitty!', and now you are in kindergarten, you know, and that's a great thing, because when you finish that you get into first grade and then, come one!, first grade leads to second grade and so on and you get out of grade school, you got high-school and it's revving up, the thing is coming! Then you gonna get to college, and get into graduate school and when you're through with graduate school you go out and join the world. And then you get into some racket, where you're selling insurance and they got that quota to make and you gonna make that! And all the time, you think 'It's coming, it's coming!', that great thing, the success you're waiting for. And then when you wake up one day, about forty years old, 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 is a hoax. And there was a hoax, a dreadful hoax! They made you miss everything! By expectation, look at the people who live to retire, who put those savings away and then when they're 65, they don't have any energy left, they're more or less impotent and they go and rot in an old people's, senior citizens community. And because we simply 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, the thing was to get to that end! Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead. But we missed the point, the whole way along! There was a musical thing and you were suppose to sing, or to dance while the music was being played.