What if you had to drop everything that you were doing and immediately give a speech on something that you had not prepared? How capable would you be in delivering it? How comfortable would you feel doing so?
Over the last few months, I have been watching more TV than I normally do and something that I’ve noticed is that everything seems to be scripted. I was privileged enough to go see a live taping of The Late Late Show with James Corden and I was somewhat mortified to see how prepared everything was. The teleprompter scrolled as Corden read. The camera rolled and the audience was directed to cheer. Hell, we were even told how to high-five the guy.
Now, I say all of this not to lambaste Corden and his crew specifically, more so to highlight the planned nature of so many aspects of our lives. As I get older, I notice that it has been more difficult to meet up with friends. It’s as if people are no longer around. They’re there, but they’re not there. They have plans for some other event and need to schedule me into their life, often weeks in advance. Yet we live next door. Sometimes in the same house. I’ve lived with up to 10 people in one house, and somehow we managed to be so busy that we never had time to hang out with each other.
I guess it all just makes me feel quite disillusioned. As if reality is now planned and by wanting to go off script, I’m begging life’s producers to fire me. How did we get to this point? Does it even matter? There could be a million different actions that slowly and gently nudged us further into following the recipe of preordained life.
Maybe what matters more is do we want to get out of it? Do we want to break with the script and say something that the producers don’t know is coming because we ourselves have no idea what’s about to emerge? What I know is that living a life set out for me seems utterly boring. I want to live more alive. Live. Like live television. Where things happen and you keep going on. You don’t know what will happen and that’s the essence of it. Maybe living is just being live.