” ‘ To sleep, perchance to dream….’ ” Lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that echo our constant search for serenity here in this life! Yesterday I was lucky enough to be in the audience of the National Endowment for the Arts performance of the play by the company at Barter Theatre, in Abingdon, Virginia. I was able, since my undergraduate days, to experience the cadence of life which is Iambic Pentameter. It both filled me, as it had in my Shakespearean classes, with awe and a wonder. How wonderful is the heart beat of life and the lines that Shakespeare penned! (I highly recommend the show which was sublime!)

There is something in this life that is like a stream beneath our everyday understanding. I find it almost a ‘cadence’ or rather a beat that pulses in the heart of the world in which we are a mere speck. I find that it pulses through our bodies while we are alive and leaves only to pulse through the earth and the universe when we have sailed on its current to where we shall reside as a greater part of this.

I did not awake this morning to be philosophical, but I find myself leaning in that direction on this Good Friday. Yes, I am a Christian in my beliefs and I try not to force my beliefs upon anyone but I find that mine are continually repelled and forced back upon myself being used as a satiric tirade in a fictional parody as a ‘Red Neck Christian Jerk’ in the battle for Gay Rights or as an ‘Ignorant’ thing from the same battalion. I shall let this be my song of life. I do not care how people live their lives. Why should I have to watch the sexual practices of others when they clearly would not want to see mine in the open? Since when do I have to be privy to everyone’s bed chamber and the things that go on therein? The cadence of life beats on despite what our particular leanings are. Life finds a way.

I care not what anyone believes as I am only responsible for what my body does in the sphere of things. The bottom line. As the cadence of life echoes through each of us, who should stand by an invisible barrier and watch the intimacies of my life? I do not like ‘transparencies’. I do not like to live in a transparent, naked world wherein everyone watches my every move and my most intimate of thoughts and actions. Why, as a culture, have we come to this?

Iambic Pentameter: The Cadence of Life. Why, do we seek to see the inner most intimacies of one another and force our own intimacies into the faces of those who would not want to see them? Since when has it become an issue wherein we must see that which we would rather not? Life will find a way and shall go on whether I countenance a harsh light shown into the dim recesses of anyone’s most intimate of acts. Where does the rhythm of life stop for the justification of others shattering of their intimacies on my retinas?

I was in an audience to see the intricacies of Hamlet’s life through the pen of William Shakespeare. Yes, it contains incest, murder most foul and unwholesome things that are committed in the lusts for power and lust for the flesh that things are done, but I was there to go into this window on his life freely. When I watch the evening News I am assailed by the cruelty, viciousness, asperity, bluntness, and over the top sensory blasting of our world in 2015. If I do not want to see it, I do not turn it on Why then, should I be force-fed anothers actions of which I do not want to see? The News stays off.

The bottom line is the Iambic Pentameter of life will go on whether you or I participate or no. It will survive us all. Therefore, why should I force anything on anyone who does not want to know or care how I believe or what I do? Food for thought.