~ Alan Watts

And all the time, this thing is coming,
it’s coming, it’s coming — that great thing,
the success you’re working for….
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 letdown, because you feel there’s 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,
and put those savings away.
And then when they’re sixty-five, and they don’t have any energy left,
they’re more or less impotent, they go and rot in an old people’s “senior citizens” community. Because we’ve simply cheated ourselves, the whole way down the line.

We thought of life by analogy was a journey,
was a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end.
And 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.
It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing,
or to dance, while the music was being played.