To Be, or Not To Be

 

This is not a post about Shakespeare, and it's not about Hamlet per se.

It's not even about how Andrew Scott, one of the most wonderful actors today, is able to convey meaning with every word, despite those words being simultaneously obscure and overly familiar.

This post is about the soliloquy itself.

Hamlet, a character described more than once as emo, has three ways of dealing with his current troubles: he can continue putting up with the whims of fortune or fate, he can try fighting the problem with the hope of resolving it, or he can die.

Seems dramatic, doesn't it, seeing death as an option, as just one of many possible solutions to life's difficulties?

It probably is drama, and it's also something I've done for almost 40 years. I still don't know how it will turn out.

Hamlet talked himself out of choosing death by imagining a terrifying afterlife. I don't believe in an afterlife, so that's not an argument I use.

What keeps me alive is the moral obligation I have to myself to stand up when I've fallen down; that, and the hope that every time I stand back up I will go on to build the life I want to keep living.