Life While-You-Wait

Ever since my favorite musician Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, I have made it a point to become familiar with the work of some of the past Literature Prize winners – which led me to discovering the poet Maria Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 award recipient.

Szymborska was born in 1923 in a small town in Poland and came of age during her country’s tumultuous struggles against Hitler and then Stalin. During the war she received her education in underground classes and later obtained work as a railroad worker, illustrator, essayist and translator. She published her first book of poetry in 1949.

She lived in Poland her whole life becoming well known and beloved within her country, but it wasn’t until she was awarded the Nobel prize that her work became widely translated and known internationally.

The Nobel committee called Szymborska “the Mozart of Poetry” and her work is known for its economy of words and exacting personal standards. When asked why she had published fewer than 350 poems during her 63 years of writing , she said: “I have a trash can in my home”.

Poetry may not be popular today, but I think it plays an important role in helping to make the private world public, in enhancing our understanding of life and in unmasking the sentiments that often go unsaid. We don’t always realize what life consists of until poetry tells us.

An example of how a poem can provide a glimpse into the hidden essence of life is Szymborska’s poem “Life While-You-Wait” — a bittersweet reflection about how our destiny is formed from life’s string of unscripted moments and split second decisions made on the fly – without time to think about the consequences of our actions.

LIFE WHILE-YOU-WAIT

Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot
just what this play’s all about.

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can’t conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can’t take back,
stars you’ll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run —
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn’t even clear my throat offstage).

You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there’s no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I’ve done.

Like Shakespeare telling us that  “All the world’s a stage“, Symborska in this poem masterfully reminds us that our life is the ultimate Improv act because nobody knows the script, what role we will be asked to play or how the story will end.

Life comes at you fast and we have to quickly decide, without the benefit of rehearsal, how to respond to the daily events of our life that are unpredictable and often beyond our control.

The decisions we make on the fly often have lasting consequence and we don’t get a chance to edit the past as Oscar Wilde recognized when he wrote “No man is rich enough to buy back his past”.

I wish I could take back some days of my past. Those days when I know that I got it wrong and those moments I squandered because “stage fright” or “extenuating circumstances” kept me frozen.

I played the roles that were mine to play and I’m happy for a lot of the things I think I did right. But looking back I ask myself if I was too comfortable being a “supporting actor” when I instead could have had a starring role had I lived more boldly.

At my age I know that I have more days behind me than ahead of me, and even though there is no way for me to go back and change past regrets, I can remind myself that today is a new premiere and that what I do today “will become forever what I’ve done”; therefore I will do my best in the days left to make the non-consequential moments consequential and to make what I do worthy of remembrance.