Have a good bit part

While watching Six Feet Under tonight on DVD, I had a Deep Thought. It isn't unusual for Six Feet Under to give Deep Thoughts (to me at least) since it's the best darned TV show ever made. It's about life, death, and everything in between so it has some passing relevance to me. What's noteworthy about tonight is that I got my Deep Thought from the credits.

Two actors had played the roles, "Boy asking for cheese", and "Leading lady #2" (not the same episode, you Six Feet Under buffs). I got to thinking about what it would be like for an actor to have a career consisting of nothing but roles like that. And then I thought to myself, that's all we are in most other people's lives. Bit parts. We get to say a line or two, then we move on. We have starring roles in our own lives of course, and maybe in one or two others if we're lucky. In a few shows we'll be notable characters, but in most we come on, do our brief spiel, and then leave forever.

What kind of bit parts do we create for ourselves in other people's lives? Just today I was probably "Enthusiastic customer", "Pontificating pedestrian", "Interested student #1", and "Forgetful neighbour". And that's pretty much the sum total of my contribution to the world at large today. Not too bad, but not too good either.

What were your bit parts today? Did you improve someone else's TV show, or detract from it? Did you add humour, drama, or pathos?

Greg Egan wrote a short story called "Seeing" about the value of eliminating the subjective point of view we have of ourselves - about viewing yourself as a character in an unfolding story and choosing to act as you would have that character act - unselfishly, generously. Like Peter Singer's ethical philosophy of acting without considering our own viewpoint as being special in any way I suppose. These ideas are similar to what I'm talking about, but perhaps they are bigger ideas, grander ones. I'm really only talking about the incidental parts of life. The parts where we are a customer in a shop undertaking a simple transaction, or a person getting on a bus, or an office worker answering someone else's phone. Maybe life is just made of a billion different fragments rather than anything bigger. Maybe we should pay more attention to the small moments and let the big ones look after themselves.

...

Hmm, no, there would be fewer than a billion fragments in life. As we computer geeks know, one second is about a nano-century, so if each fragment of life lasts 10 seconds, and since we spend a third of our lives asleep, and life expectancy is about 75 years, that makes about 50 million fragments of life that we get. Make them count.