On Surrendering the Burden of Life and the Cosmic Joke
Author: Francesco Papagni.
.But if life becomes a game, a dance, a performance, everything changes. It no longer matters where it leads, but how each step unfolds. For a moment, we are free from the fight. Free to breathe, to let the current carry us without fear.
Not every crisis comes with noise. Sometimes it is not a catastrophe, not a dramatic event, but a quiet weight.
A restlessness that slips into ordinary hours, hidden in the routines we all share.
It does not break us, it bends us. Like wind moving through a field of wheat. Subtle, insidious, without form, and therefore harder to face.
I think of
(sidenote: Was anItalian poet, prose writer, editor and translator. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975.)
, of that verse that became universal for so many: “Often the burden of life I have met.”
His poetry touches a deep truth. You do not need a great tragedy to feel the weight of existence. The burden of life shows up silently, in days that look the same, in duties that suffocate desire, in ambitions consumed by the ordinary.
It hides in the everyday. It looks at us from the margins of our routines, making us feel incomplete, estranged, even in the middle of what should be familiar. It is not so much an obstacle, it is a presence. The same presence Montale describes, inevitable, subtle, teaching us, in spite of ourselves, what it means to live. Find out more about Eugenio Montale.
And here the vision of (sidenote: A self-declared "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.) and Hindu philosophy enters. Montale names the harshness of reality. The Indian tradition invites us to look beyond, to suspend judgment. Hinduism tells us that this world, with its flaws and its sorrows, is lila. A divine play, a theater where each of us has only a temporary role.
Alan Watts, fascinated by this idea, saw life as a stage on which we dance. A plot where individuality dissolves into the universal. Every step, every gesture, matters not for its end, but for how we live it in the present. According to Watts, life is not something to be taken too seriously. It is a game, a ballet, where each moment is a step. What matters is not where we arrive, but how we dance, how we live each instant.
This way of seeing is not the only one. Yet it has something profoundly liberating. If the world is an implacable machine, a chain of causes and effects with no escape, then life becomes only a struggle against time. A chase to gain, to control, to achieve. But if it is a game, a dance, a performance, everything changes. It no longer matters where it leads, but how each step unfolds. For a moment, we are free from the fight. Free to breathe, to let the current carry us without fear.
This vision of the universe as play, as cosmic joke, resonates across cultures. Taoism too speaks of the world as a flow, where opposites merge and meaning is found not in a final destination, but in balance. Here too the message is clear. Trying to dominate life only brings frustration. Life is a current we cannot stop. But we can adapt, moving with its rhythm, finding sense not in control but in surrender.
And so, I invite you to consider your own struggles as part of this dance. Not every difficulty is dramatic. Yet even in small pains, in daily frustrations, there is space to grow. If we stop seeing obstacles as enemies to defeat, and start to see them as part of this stage, we shed a weight. We do not always need to win. Sometimes it is enough to witness the challenge, without judgment. To let it be, as part of our path.
This is what life has taught me. Every difficulty can become a teacher, if we allow it to speak to us. Growth does not only come through victories, but often through acceptance. Through the ability to find a new balance.
And then, perhaps, pain and struggle are no longer adversaries. They are steps in the dance we already belong to.
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