Improbable Fiction

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth
(Act V, Scene v)

When we blatantly violate other peoples perspective, be it their deeply held values or our fly by night opinions, when we questions their sense of identity, we either damage our relationship with them or their relationship with their own sense of self. Either way it hurts. In my role as a management consultant, I have to do this as part of my job. Even if it is not expected of me, I have to do it if I am to add any semblance of value to the drama that is unfolding on my client’s stage. I am invited to play the fool in their play (so much so that they pay my cab fare to get there).

This is when the rage enters the stage of human affairs. The drama being played out in the ‘hype-space’ of our living rooms, streets,  stores and more recently in on-line chat rooms or their more grandiose home of blogs, wikki’s and pod-casts. This is our stage and we get so much time on it.

Arguments are important, questioning what we see, think and feel is vitally important. The grandy daddy of them all Socrates said it the best way it could be said: “an unexamined life is not worth living”

We need to pay attention to the argument and the plot, but also the arena within which it is cloaked. A teenage will rail against a parent who says “study and prosper” but will be comforted by a peer who is helping them through their exams.

A friend will challenge our thinking and yet the same words from someone we distrust are examined, as we dig our nails deep into the earth of our own insecurity. Two neighbours will fight over an overhanging tree but when a war breaks out they fall deeply in love with each other on the battle field. Such is the nature of the stage.

The fool played such a special role in Shakespeare’s stage. The fool was the audience on the stage. The fool could see through the false face paint and flaws of all the other players. The fool asked questions that cut through the comfortable convenience these players, tearing apart their labels of self adornment.

Our chief challenge is to step off this stage, walk away from our selves, to be self and stage aware. It goes beyond sensing and seeing our drama through the eyes of the people on the stage, but sizing up the stage, the environment in which the drama is occurring. These insights open our eyes. Once we learn to see with these eyes, we can engage more fully and take the drama beyond sensationalism to a realism that is enlightening, so much so that we awaken at every step, being free'd by every foolish thing we say and do.

We can draw cold comfort from the fact that today is just another phrase in history, it will never be read (accurately - if at all), this stage will whither back into planks of old wood and into silent darkeness after the fall of the final curtain call.

“If this were played upon a stage now,
I could condemn it as an improbable fiction”
Twelfth-Night
(Act III, Scene iv)