“Look around, Look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now!”
It’s an oddly simple line, isn’t it? There are no complicated underlying meanings or complex sentence structures. The longest word in the sentence is “around.” However, these words performed on stage by select cast members of the Broadway play “Hamilton: An American Musical” evoke many emotional responses.
Some believe the words to simply be marks on a page. It is just a line to be performed by an actor or actress as though it means something to his or her character. Others peer into the page, dissecting each word into separate letters and syllables to find the true purpose the author intended when he printed his thoughts on the page. These are normally the performers themselves. They yearn for a meaning in the script. They take the words and apply them to their own life. They want to believe there is more than just the narrative. Then, there are some that receive the words as an audience and are impacted by their existence and they open their mind to new points of view.
So many times we forget to be thankful for what we are blessed with. Somewhere along the lines, human nature was altered to teach us to look at life with a “glass half-empty” mentality. It’s a pessimistic outlook that does nothing to benefit anyone. Yet, each day we move about cursing at the guy who made you miss the light, complaining about the promotion you didn’t get, and moping around the house when your crush doesn’t text you back. When these situations arise we seem to go into a mindset of “Golden-Age thinking.”
Golden-Age thinking (as defined by Tom Hiddleston in a fantastic interview with NerdHQ’s Zachary Levi at San Diego Comic-Con in 2013. He says it somewhere in there. Sorry no shorter verision. Although its a great interview and worth a watch if you have the time.) is when a person believes that’s there is a better time before now. People try to hark back to a time or age before now. You here folks talk about how much life was simpler in the 1980’s or how the economic boom of the 1990’s was the only time to live in. That’s nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there were plenty of amazing experiences in those decades but the time is now. We should celebrate that.
If we don’t fall back into Golden-Age thinking, we often spring forward and look to the future. As young teens we can’t wait to get out of our parents’ house or we pray for weeks of classes to go by so we can finally be done with school not realizing the time we are wishing away. The future may hold many great endeavors, however the future is never promised. We should never take the future for anything other than a mystery because no matter how much we plan or claim to know what is going to happen, we honestly have no control. Time will get you to the future. Time is constantly moving our lives forward. It lets us capture it’s moments in snapshots and videos but it remains steadfast to let us only visit those moments briefly. Time never allows us to relive it in its entirety. The future will get here. Like Ferris says “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
So what can we do? We can live now. There is no other time to live in. We cannot go back or jump forward any more than we can stop the sun from rising and setting. We can count our blessings and share our time with the people we love. We can “look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now!”
