The Old Song and Dance

“... and when I clap my hands three times, you will cease flapping your arms up and down, and stop clucking like a chicken.”

Clap - Clap - Clap

It is strange to find yourself so suddenly awakened and alone upon the world’s stage with no idea how you came to be there, to be standing before a billion eyes and ears that restlessly watch and wait. “What to do?” You wonder. “What to say?”

Your mind works stiffly, like muscles that have been long asleep. You need time to think. You need a diversion to buy some time, so you begin to dance lightly, slowly... an old soft shoe. On the curtains behind you the dazzling spotlights cast an eerie shadow partner who keeps perfect step to your taps, kicks and twirls. Nervous laughter ripples through the crowd, quickly followed by scattered shouts of angst and frustration, with the occasional long and drawn out “BOOOO” emanating from mouths bravely hidden in the deepest dark of the back rows.

The crowd is impatient, so you quit the dance. You look out at the throngs, but you whisper your question to them inwardly, “What is it that you want, then?”

As you stand before them gazing into the many eyes the answer reveals itself, or perhaps you knew it all along?

They want the answers, the answers to the hard questions. They believe you have those answers... and perhaps you do. You have spent a lifetime searching them out, digging for nuggets of wisdom in the strangest, most illogical of places. It is no simple thing to find those nuggets, so you can easily understand why the masses hunger for them, and why they beg to be handed them on a platter.

You think then to give the answers to them. Why not? What is it to you, after all? But as you begin to speak your voice cracks, so you stop. You see their blissfully ignorant, and skeptical faces shining through the footlights. You realize that, even should you give them the treasured secrets, your truths will not be believed. The true “pearls of wisdom” are too subtle, too obviously simple to be understood by those who have not sought them out themselves, just as a fortune is soon squandered by he who did not earn it.

So you stand before them, those ignorant, arrogant faces; faces too young, too “busy,“ or just too lazy to put in the work that the learning takes. They are faces that want easy answers to the most difficult questions, so that they can then as easily reject those answers as coming from someone old, and archaic... someone out of touch with today’s evolved mind, and world.

... and you begin to dance once more.