Pay Attention Before It's Too Late

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”

I recently saw the Broadway revival of Our Town, a classic play first performed back in 1938. It’s been produced ever since, everywhere from high school productions to movies, as well as translated for adaptation in other markets.

Much of the play consists of scenes of ordinary life. A mother makes breakfast for her children, neighbors gossip across their yards, kids walk home from school, a choir practices at church. If you saw just one of these moments, you might find it boring and plotless. Taken together, however, they tell a collective story of life.

The production I saw was presented in three acts without intermission, with the culmination occurring in Act 3. Since the whole play is about the life cycle of a town, hopefully it’s not a huge spoiler to say that the third act is about death.

A character who dies joins her new companions in the graveyard where they speak about life on the other side. The newly deceased struggles to adapt to life in the cemetery (no pun intended!), and longs to cross back over. Watching the living, she exclaims, "I can't look at everything hard enough!”

The central message: people often fail to notice the beauty and magic of their ordinary lives. This message is summarized in a monologue with the play's most famous line:

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”

Most people in Our Town aren’t really trying to change the world, at least by the standards of many classic stories. They don’t have moonshot goals, they aren’t hustling to get ahead, they don’t really do much at all. And yet this is fine! The implied lesson of the play isn’t “Hey, you should set goals and do bigger things”—it’s “You should notice and appreciate the beauty of life around you.”

In other words, no matter how you live your life—in pursuit of big goals or not—you still have the choice to pay attention. You can still realize life, in the words of the playwright, or you can let it pass you by. Most people let it pass them by, at least to some degree, and the ultimate takeaway of Our Town is “pay close attention.”

This message of paying attention—of truly seeing the life around us—has been told countless ways throughout history. But sometimes it takes a story, a play, or a work of art to make us feel it rather than just understand it.

Whether you've seen the play or not, the question remains worth asking: how are you paying attention today?

*I enjoyed this version of Our Town, but not as much as one I saw a decade ago. This version was modernized, and while in some ways that's good (more diverse casting, for example), some of the other changes felt gimmicky to me. Still, I liked it overall and especially appreciated the third act.