Live Your Life like Music, Not like a Journey

Explaining the philosophy and life advice I got tattooed on my chest.

About 2 months ago, I got a new tattoo. I have had a wolf on the left side of my chest for a while, and now I decided to add something to it. Et voilà, two grueling multiple hour sessions later, the words “Life is music” and a clef made it into my skin.

Despite my love for listening to music for hours on end, I am quite nonmusical.

So how did I end up with this tattoo? Why did I decide to have something inked into the second layer of my skin forever? It’s because these three simple words carry a ton of meaning for me. They are one of the most fundamental pieces of life advice and philosophy I have ever heard. And they are something that I strive to live by, day after day, every day.

Your Life is Not a Journey

It all started with me watching a video of Alan Watts’ “Life is not a journey” speech. In it, Watts says the following:

The Existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere. That is to say it doesn’t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. But that it is best understood by analogy with music. Because music, as an art form, is essentially playful, we say you play the piano. You don’t work the piano. Why?

This is the foundation of the whole story. The universe, the greatest thing in existence known to mankind, doesn’t serve a final purpose. It is not working towards a certain goal. It doesn’t care. It simply exists for the sake of existing. And if the whole universe doesn’t have a goal it’s running towards, why should we? After all, we are nothing but a grain of dust amidst what we believe to be infinite space and time.

Music differs from say, travel. When you travel, you are trying to get somewhere. In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that was so the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to a concert just to hear one crackling chord, because that’s the end! Same when dancing, you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room, that’s where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.

Here, Watts makes the point that music doesn’t have a purpose it is working towards. That’s why music is like the universe. The point of a song is not its end. It is every second of it, every little note that is to be enjoyed in the moment it is played. And the same goes for dancing.

Now, but we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We’ve got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It’s all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system, with a kind of come on, kitty, kitty, kitty and now you go to kindergarten, you know, and that’s a great thing because when you finish that you’ll get into first grade. And then come on, first grade leads to second grade and so on and then you get out of grade school and you go to high school and it’s revving up, the thing is coming.

Then you’re gonna go to college and by Jove then you get into graduate school and when you’re through with graduate school, you’ll go out to join the world. And then you’ll get into some racket where you are selling insurance and they’ve got that quota to make and you’re going to make that. And all the time that thing is coming, it’s coming, it’s coming that great thing, the success you’re working for.

Watts argues that most people are running like a hamster in a wheel. From the introduction of the grading system in first grade over high school and university towards our job and retirement, we are all running towards something.

We study for tests so we get good grades, so we get into a good university, so we get a good job, so we earn good money, so we can buy a house and put the rest into our savings account, so we can finally enjoy life and at one point, retire. Ouff, I made it.

Then when you wake up one day about forty years old, you’ll say, my God I’ve arrived. I’m there! And you don’t feel very different from what you’ve always felt. Look at the people who live to retire and put those savings away. And then when they’re 65, they don’t have any energy left, they’re more or less impotent and they go and rot in an on old people’s senior citizens community.

And then what? Then you’ve got it. The thing you’ve always been working towards. The nice house, the dream vacation, the wife or husband and two kids. Now you can finally enjoy life. Right? Wrong.

Because by the time you have everything set up, by the time you have achieved all your goals, what are you going to do? You are so used to chasing goal after goal that you will feel empty without. If there is no goal to achieve, what is the purpose of your life going to be? Yes, I know that there are plenty of things to do once you are able to retire. Plenty of other goals to chase if you feel like it. But that is not the point. The point is that

[…] we’ve simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. And we thought of life by analogy with a journey, with 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.

Life is not a journey. It doesn’t have a goal at the end, a large banner spanned across the finish line saying “Congrats, you made it this far without dying” on it.

Life is about living. It is about enjoying what is, in the very moment it is happening.

Stop and Smell the Flowers

I know this all sounds kind of hippie-ish and somehow esoteric. And I don’t expect you to turn your whole life upside down, quit your job and reject all worldly possessions from now on. Quite the contrary. I know that some things in life require planning, they require working towards a goal for a prolonged period of time, sometimes years. And I know that the idea of one day being able to retire and not stress about money no more sounds very appealing to a lot of people, including myself. And that’s coolsies.

All I’m saying is that it’s easy to get sucked into the rat race and to be stuck in the rut of chasing goal after goal. And that sometimes, it might pay off to step out of the hamster wheel, to take some time off and smell the flowers.

Find joy in what you do and do what you enjoy. Do things for the sake of doing them, not just because they will get you somewhere.

Keep in mind that the music is playing, it is playing right now, at this very moment. And it’s live music. You can’t rewind it. You can’t listen to it again. You can’t ask the DJ to Pon de Replay. Every second, minute, hour or day that passes is gone for good. That is what makes life so incredibly precious.

Earth is turning, the clock is ticking and the music is playing anyway. So you might as well sing and dance and enjoy instead of waiting for the final chord, hoping for an encore.

Life is music.

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