The show is over.  We had our last performance yesterday.  It was a great day – the Governor of Massachusetts was in the audience! – and a great run.  It was a marvelous five weeks.  But it's over now.

By its very nature, theater is a fleeting thing.  A play happens in discrete time, and then it passes.  One performance gives way to another, no one exactly the same, and, eventually, they're all done.  It no longer exists, nor is there the daily expectation of a future existence.  The run is over.  Such is the tyranny of theatrical time….

Last evening, as I settled back into a more typical summer routine (also ephemeral, of course) of watching the Yankees beat the Red Sox, I felt, for a moment, as if Our Town had never happened.  Of course, I am filled with good memories and warm feelings about it, but its time is now past, and it will slip slowly into a more distant history.  Memories will dim and only traces of the dense real time of the play will exist in a few written and electronic sources.  It's sad – and there was a bittersweet quality to the goodbye hugs after the last show.  But it's also quite in keeping with the theme of the play itself: we have our time of life, we fill it with experiences, most of them ordinary (and it is in that ordinariness that beauty and wisdom lie), and then it's gone.  Zhuangzi says something similar:

This life we're given comes in its own season, and then follows its vanishing away.  If you're at ease in your season, if you can dwell in its vanishing, joy and sorrow never touch you.  This is what the ancients called getting free.  If you can't get free, you're tangled in things.  And things have never overcome heaven.  So what is there to regret?

So, I won't regret that the play is over – that could cause me to get "tangled in things" like sorrow and sadness.  Instead I will "dwell in its vanishing."   It was a great run, a beautiful time, but Way inexorably unfolds…