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Why Wait For Godot?

Sunday, April 8, 2012 23:46

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I have always loved the ‘Theatre of the Absurd,’ of which Samuel Beckett (pictured left) was one of its leading exponents.

En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) is Beckett’s most well-known play. It’s not so much a comedy as a farce—and a tragic one at that. Vladimir and Estragon, two tramps, are forever waiting for the arrival of the mysterious ‘Godot.’

The tramps believe that Godot will in some unexplained way make everything different. Godot will give meaning and coherence to their miserable lives, and will relieve their metaphysical anguish. Just the thought of God’s supposed imminent arrival gives the two tramps some false comfort and relief from the existential absurdity and pointlessness of their condition.

However, Godot never comes.

The movement of the play is simply the action of ‘waiting.’ Thus, much of the dialogue in the play goes like this:

‘Let’s go.’

‘We can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘We’re waiting for Godot.’

‘Ah.’

Beckett, when asked what he meant by Godot, said, ‘If I knew I should have said so in the play.’ The truth is Godot is whatever we ‘attach’ ourselves to when we are not living mindfully in the Eternal Now. We all seem to be waiting for something—or someone. We may be waiting for our 18th birthday. We may be waiting for the weekend, for Christmas, for our next holidays, for our next sexual encounter, or for the Second Coming. It doesn’t matter. We are all like Vladimir and Estragon, who fail even at being nihilists. We will do anything but live in the Eternal Now.

Godot is the future. If we are living in the future—which doesn’t exist in any event—we are not living mindfully in the Eternal Now. That is a sure recipe for utter hopelessness and futility—the ‘action’ (or rather inaction) of waiting. So many of us are like Vladimir and Estragon—ruined by the habit of inaction or of acting without one’s own initiative. There is not even the will to decide not to go on, that is, to end it all.

There is only one way to live with purpose—even when confronted with utter hopelessness—and that is to choose to live mindfully in the Eternal Now. True, ‘There’s no lack of void,’ as Estragon says in the play, but if you face each moment with directness and immediacy by maintaining bare attention to, and being choicelessly aware of, whatever is the ‘content’ of each passing moment, from one moment to the next, your life will be meaningful and coherent—even in the face of an otherwise indecipherable cosmos.

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WALKING IN THE ETERNAL NOW

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