Some people find it ironical that although we run a travel agency, we’ve never been outside of Blaine. – Waiting for Guffman
Oops. Wrong quote.
The book that changed my life is not a book, it happens to be a play. Plays and scripts make great reading since they don’t have all those pesky paragraphs. Or adjectives. Or frankly, so damned many words. I’ve never seen Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot performed, and yet it created a fork at a time when my life was moving along a knife.
Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!
The themes of Waiting for Godot are open to interpretation which, as an existentialist absurdist tragicomedy play, is the whole point of it. What the Hell? Am I about to go all pseudo-intellectual on your ass? Nah. Don’t worry. I may be a big freaking nerd, but I’m not a pretentious, elitist nerd. Unless you want to start debating Kirk vs. Picard.
Here’s the basic concept that guides my own philosophy – there is no higher meaning to life beyond what you put into it. A person has to create value by living, not by simply talking about it or thinking about it. When I was a fresh-faced college student, that realization shook me out of the complacency and confusion I had about the next steps in my life and pushed me to pursue what made me happy.
Estragon: Let’s go.
Vladimir: We can’t.
Estragon: Why not?
Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot.
The other theme that spoke to me, as indicated by the title, is that of waiting. Godot is the tale of two men who never act and never change. They while away their days and years waiting for a man who never arrives. They aren’t sure who he is, when he’s coming or even why they’re waiting.
Waiting sucks. Waiting holds us back. Waiting stalls our life. Waiting is in the title of a crappy Richard Marx song. Although honestly, the only thing Richard Marx should have stopped waiting for was a trip to the barber.
image credit: gpssue
By far, the #1 most hated thing about going to theme parks is waiting. Yet when it comes to our lives, we always find reasons to wait. We wait until we have more money, we wait until we have vacation time saved up. We wait until the kids are grown, the house is paid off, we retire. As I’ve mentioned, I waited with the hopes that I would get laid off from my job and I waited for a severance check that never came.
Estragon: Don’t let’s do anything. It’s safer.
Vladimir: Let’s wait and see what he says.
Estragon: Who?
Vladimir: Godot.
The tragedy of Vladimir and Estragon is that they never do anything. For over 50 years, they follow the same routine. Their lives are on auto pilot to such an extent that they barely remember yesterday, because every day is the same. During the whirlwind of travel and adventure, time may run together and you might mix up what you did and when, but you’re never lacking in memories.
There are always reasons to wait. Inertia is incredibly powerful, but the nice thing about inertia is that once you get that object moving, it tends to keep moving. What does that mean to me? It means that going with the flow has had me going in circles, so it’s again time to hop into a new flow.
I’m done waiting. My timeline may say that June 30th is my departure date, but until then I know what I’ll be doing. I’ll be planning, I’ll be preparing, I’ll be sharing. I won’t be waiting.
(Side note: Waiting for Godot has nothing to do track cycling, but in researching this post, I found a bit of history that Beckett himself did wait for French cyclist Roger Godeau outside the velodrome in Roubaix. The fact that cycling is another of my passions just makes me love this play that much more).
