Please welcome my guest blogger– Rob, from HumansAreWeird! I’m addicted to his blog because… well, it’s weird. He’s frightfully witty, wondrously silly, and quite talented with the written word.
http://humansareweird.com
After you read his thoughts on taking life seriously, or not, be sure to pop over to his place and spread some rawr love his way!
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The name Oscar Wilde wasn’t one I grew up with. I’m sure that I heard its syllables uttered from the apertures of my past English teachers, at some stage – at least once – but, despite that I want to ‘be a writer’, not reading nor writing constituted much of my teenage quotidian. And so, the name Oscar Wilde remained to me either totally unknown, or, an infinitesimal slice of memory stored somewhere in the attic of my mind’s past eye.
Accordingly, one day, when my mum, I think it was my mum, was telling me to take something of some sort ‘seriously’ – like my doing homework, or something – I thought I was being exceptionally clever when I responded by exclaiming: “But life’s too important to take seriously.”
And as you might well know, that quote my mind conjured in its adolescence has already seen and made rounds of society’s canvass.
Cause Oscar Wilde, or rather, Lord Darlington, one of Oscar’s characters in the play Lady Windermere’s Fan (a piece of comedic genius), already said: “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it”.
Anyway, I don’t mind that so much. We live in a post-modern age where everything’s already been done, dusted, bottled up and sold through the market’s conduits. It’s to be expected that anything I might come up with that I consider even remotely clever has already had its time in the limelight.
Nevertheless, it’s a great sentiment. Life is too important to be taken seriously.
Isn’t it?
Obviously, considering that I thought I was the virgin through whom this expression was birthed, I truly do believe that life is, indeed, far too important a thing to be taken seriously. But I’ve found that not so many others share this thought.
Contrarily, many think of its meaning as redundant, or vacuous, or ignorant, or worse yet, destructive, the bad kind of destructive, or even dangerous.
People think, as I’ve found, that life should, in some instances, in those cases necessitating furrowed brows and grave stares and creased chins, be taken seriously.
That sometimes, life should be taken with an air of supercilious maudlinism, as if being serious in ‘serious’ situations is somehow, for some reason, in some fashion, better than heeding to action or thought or feeling, or some other ‘thing’ pertaining to seriousness’ antithesis.
But I reckon that’s ever so silly an attitude to adopt.
Because, you see, my cyber friends, seriousness needn’t assume heaviness; it needn’t assume melancholy; it needn’t assume pride or hauteur; it needn’t assume tasteless ties or insipid style or a trimmed and tamed demeanour or a stroke of one’s dimpled and oh-so-serious chin.
Seriousness needn’t assume “seriousness”, in the stereotypical sense.
But why do I say that? Why shouldn’t serious things be taken seriously?
Because it makes life less enjoyable, of course.
I don’t know about you, hypothetical humanoid, but making light of the heavy can transform life, in its general whole, into something of a pleasure, rather than something of a pain or despair.
Living life with a base made up of insouciance, atop a tapestry woven of calculated conviviality and wisdom that supports the whimsical and merry – under the guise that life is too important to be taken seriously – takes the cumbersome burden of anxiety’s, nay, of life’s forlorn grip off of one’s shoulders.
By taking the stuff that would otherwise make us feel a bit ill, or a bit stressed, or a bit sad or morose, and understanding that really, at the day’s end, or the morrow’s beginning, shit’s not that important, life becomes fun. Resplendent. Joyful. Easy (well, easier).
If you’re able to acknowledge how your mortality, your life, and all that it comprises – your job, your wife, your husband, your car, your kids, your wealth or lack thereof, all your hopes and your dreams and your nightmares and everything else you hold dear or deliberately at a pole’s length – is, from a macrocosmic level, ultimately meaningless, but paradoxically, also unfathomably grand and extraordinary – then life becomes beautiful. Oh so beautiful.
In this light-hearted way, the pressing exigency of life that is this current moment, now, the now, our senses become exposed to life’s innermost splendour. Our minds, our noses, our eyes and our hearts are allowed to mingle in with life’s whole, and able to dance through life’s shining field without care or fret – or self.
If we look at life, not as a chore that we must endure, not as a serious matter that we must respect with thin lips and squinted eyes, but instead as a place where magic abounds and love radiates, then life, seriously, in all its un-seriousness, shapes something truly miraculous.
Humans-are-weird.
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Now that you have a sampling of why Rob’s blog has been a staple of my blog-reading diet since I found him, check him out for more awesomeness! I couldn’t pick, so I selected some recently wonderful posts:
- http://humansareweird.com/2013/08/23/blogging-bringing-people-together/ (He mentions me here!)
- http://humansareweird.com/2013/09/14/five-things-you-should-never-tell-your-children/
- http://humansareweird.com/2013/07/19/a-letter-to-stephen-fry/
In the meantime, share your thoughts with us on how you see life, and whether or not you believe in taking it seriously.
