One of my usual hobbies is reading scripts of my favorite television shows off of the Internet. These days, Grey’s Anatomy had been ranking way up in my favorites list. So there I was reading an episode away when spunky Dr. Bailey delivers a striking line I still find so intrinsically disturbing that I felt compelled to write about it: “We’re all part of the cosmic joke.”
If you have been religiously watching the show as I am, you would know that Grey’s Anatomy is about Meredith Grey, a medical intern at Seattle Grace Hospital, and her group of doctor/surgeon friends, all of whom are trying to save the world, one 3-day shift at a time, while juggling their lives together with it. Each episode brings a window to various life stories as the doctors face one patient after another. On this episode that Dr. Bailey made me stop reading in my tracks, Dr. George O’Malley comes across a patient who jumped from a 5-storey building and lived to tell the tale with no more than a shattered leg bone. Yeah, it does sound like it probably hurt, but apparently if you jump from such a height, you’re expected to have incurred more damage than that (i.e. crushed lungs, and the like). And while George thought that it was a “carpe diem” moment, the patient wasn’t exactly in a seizing-the-day mood. It turns out that the reason why he jumped in the first place is because of some girl who works in the very same hospital, the one he considers to be the love of his life. So while they prepped the patient for surgery, and after reconsidering his original motives, and much of Dr. O’Malley’s continued arguments of surviving for fated second chances, George goes off to find the girl, only to find that she doesn’t want anything to do with him. When the patient asks kind and gentle O’Malley as to what had transpired on his meeting with his girl, George simply tells him she was on vacation, to spare him the disappointment and probably hurt. Realizing his newfound purpose in life, they proceed with the operation. And just like that, just when the anesthesia first kicked in, he dies. And George desperately tried to make sense out of what had happened, Dr. Bailey goes on to shed some light, and according to her, we’re all part of the cosmic joke.
Could it possibly be true? Could we have been living lives based on some joke by the cosmos? I don’t really believe in fate or destiny, but I won’t deny that there are times when I just can’t help but wonder if certain things are just meant to be and are just out of our control. The patient’s tale was a perfect example. He tries to kill himself, but survives, leading one to immediately assume that there’s something bigger planned out for the remainder of his life. A chance. A second chance for repentance, for rekindling what was lost, for whatever. He survives so he could be with the love of his life, and she doesn’t even want to see him. So, really, what was the point? And just when he realizes his reason for living, he dies. Again, what’s the point? What’s the point of having been given a second chance when it was taken out his hands just as easily? Was that the cosmos mocking him, telling it to his face that he made a mistake? Was that really something that fate had in store for him, a fleeting chance to find purpose, only to have it taken away? Seriously, what’s the point of all that, then? Was that some sick joke that the gods all across the heavens contrived for their amusement? Could cosmic fate be God’s version of irony?
I’m just baffled, is all. We make so many choices in our lives everyday, and we don’t even fully understand half of it. The other half we could probably second-guess, but there’s no certainty as to why we’re doing it either, is there? How ironic that we have to go through all sorts of trouble in life when we don’t even have a purpose for doing it in the first place.
Realization. Could that be what life is truly about? We only get to live our lives to realize the errors of our ways, and before we even realize it fully, it’s too late. It’s always already too frigging late…
:p
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Quotable quote, not necessarily related to this post, but noteworthy nonetheless:
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women are merely players. They have their exits and their entrances." - William Shakespeare, As You Like It...
