Playing Our Parts Big And Small

One of Shakespeare’s most memorable quotations is “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Like other quotes from the Bard, this one can be interpreted in many fruitful ways.

One of the ways Shakespeare’s quotation speaks to me is its emphasis on the word “all.” “All men and women are players” and “All the world is a stage.” To make the quotation even more mind-blowing, we might add the phrase “all at the same time.” “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players all at the same time.”

Put another way, everyone we meet in a day, loved ones to friends to mere acquaintances, is living out her or his life story at the same time that you and I are living out our stories and everyone else is living out theirs. As Shakespeare might have explained it, every one of us in on the same world stage, reciting our lines, our different lines, at the same time.

One fascinating insight that comes from this is that each of us, at the same moment, is playing different roles in different dramas. In any given moment, we are probably playing the leading role in our own lives, an important but secondary role in the lives close to us, and a minor role or no role at all in the lives of others. In the same instant, what we say and do can be life-changing for us, or something heard and understood only partially by those close to us, or something that is just part of the background noise for other people.

Does this kind of thinking simply lead us down a rabbit hole, or does it actually make a point worth pondering? One of the lessons it teaches is that we simply don’t know when something we say or do will change our lives or the lives of others around us. As we are delivering our lines on the stage of life, we might think, because we control what we are saying, that we also control what is heard. The truth is that we don’t have total control over how our lines are heard or not-heard.

As a retired professor, I have had past students tell me that they have never forgotten something that I said in class one day, something that even changed their lives. In almost every case, when they repeat what they remember me saying, I have no recollection of ever saying that. In some cases, I can’t see myself even thinking that thought, much less saying it.

I have been on the other side of the same conversation, thanking someone for something they said or wrote only to have the person look at me with that blank expression of “Did I really say or write that?”

There is a lesson here about humility. We might hope that we will be remembered for certain things we said or achieved in our lives, but maybe that’s just ego. The truth might be closer to mystery. The best piece of advice we will ever give, the best contribution to the world that we will leave behind, might be something we don’t remember ever saying or doing.