The existence, the physical universe is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn't going anywhere. That is to say it doesn't have a destination it ought to arrive at. But it is best understood by analogy of music. Because music as an art form, is essentially playful. We say you play the piano, you don't work it. Why? Music differs from say travel. When you travel you are trying to get somewhere. In music though, one doesn't make the end of the composition. If that were the case the best conductors would be the ones who played the fastest. And there would be composers who only wrote finales. People would only go to concerts to hear just one cracking chord because that's the end! Same way dancing, you don't aim at a particular spot in the room because that's where you should arrive. The whole point of the dance is the dance. But we don't see that as something brought by our education into our every day conduct. We have a system of schooling that gives us a completely different impression. It's all graded and what we do is put the child into a corridor with this grade system with a kind of "come on kitty, kitty" and you go to kindergarten and thats a great thing because when you finish that you get into first grade and the first grade leads to second grade and so on. And then you get out of grade school and you got high school, and its revving up, the thing is coming, then you're going to college and then graduate school, and when you're through with graduate school you go out to join the world. Then you get into some racket where you are selling insurance, and they've got that quota to make, and you're going to make that. And all the time that 'thing' is coming. It's coming, it's coming. That great "thing". The success you're working for. Then when you wake up one day about 40 years old and you say "My god I've arrived, I'm there". And you don't feel different from what you've always felt. Look at the people who live to retire, to put those savings away. And then when they are 65 they don't have any energy left. And they go and rotten in some senior citizen community. Because we simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was to get to that end. Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were suppose to sing, or to dance while the music was being played.

- Alan Watts