You Can't Stop The Beat

This weekend, my daughter will complete her performances in a teen theater production of Hairspray. When all is said and done, I will have seen it 3 or 4 times. And then we will all move on to the next thing--little league, state tests, piano recitals, summer camp. As the song says, "You can't stop the beat" (or, better yet, "you can't stop an avalanche").
 
I don't think we live a particularly big life, really I don't. But I guess with five people, each with a whole set of life activities, you just have to do some simple multiplication to know that every event will end up leading into (or more often overlapping with) another.
 
So, how is it, with a beat that you can't stop, that you make sure to celebrate the successes? To applaud enough at the performances, to light all the birthday candles, to prepare for the tests, and to cheer at the games? And to mourn the losses? How is it that you even know which are the non-negotiables and which are the "it will happen agains"?
 
Perhaps the trick is thinking about it all less as multiplication and more as musical theater. Mathematically, it might be impossible to make all the equations work. The numbers are the numbers, and numbers are consistent. But in musical theater, though you might try to make it perfect and consistent every night, things change. Sometimes people will miss their marks, and sometimes everything will come together for a show that sings. So if our beat never stops, sometimes the best we can do is try for that perfect performance, then accept and move on when one show's not so perfect. Would a missed note or a missed step make us give up on the theater? Of course not. So, when the beat never stops in our lives, the best we can do is just to keep dancing. Enjoy each song. And remember that we will almost always have a chance to do it better at the next show.