Don’t you love it when snippets of conversations and readings and thoughts come together, even if just for a moment?
I woke up thinking of part of a conversation with a friend at a play yesterday: “I’ve been wondering who I was before I had children. Who was she?”
I was reminded of that conversation when reading today’s post in the blog Birth of a Play(wright):
“[I] feel the little 8 year old girl inside me who is watching Patti LuPone on stage and saying ‘I want to be Evita when I grow up.’ I think she will always be there, egging me on. She’s egged me on to a lot of incredible musical experiences in my life, if not to an actual money-making career. Maybe I can learn to be content with that.”
This led to memories of reading Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas in college and, this morning, finding the article “On the Quest for Happiness“:
“[Johnson] seeks to dramatize that the travelers have at last realized that there is no single choice of life that will satisfy them. The nature of desire makes the acquisition of happiness impossible. As he observed in one of his essays: ‘we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else and begin a new pursuit.’”
And here I sit on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with no answers to deep questions (as usual) and too lazy to try to figure any out, content simply to let these thoughts coincide for awhile and talk to each other.
