Alexandersmap

    Tag: Pink Floyd

    • Story Weaving

      “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.” ― Leonard Bernstein

      The end of July regularly presents a staggeringly quick departure of the potential of summer. August brings us the dog days of summer, and for many, an early return to the structure of school or work. I used to believe that summer ended after the 4th of July. Nowadays I don’t worry as much about beginnings and endings of seasons, but note the changes nonetheless. We have the time we have. Use it or lose it. It’s the beginning of harvest time—but what have we sown?

      Summer changes by the day, and of course, so do we. Instead of regretting the passing of time, we ought to focus on what we’re doing with it now. We make our grand plans—how are those going? When is that novel coming out anyway? How about that fitness routine started and restarted again? Books read? Projects completed? The list goes on, but we know the score. Life has its say. It’s up to us to weave our story in and around all that happens along the way.

      Right on queue as I’m writing this, my phone is erupting with work messages pulling my attention away from completing this very blog post. It can be challenging to be mindful and creative when the world demands attention. Turning off the noise isn’t always possible when we live a full life, but we must train ourselves to block off time for the sacrosanct. To fritter and waste the time in an offhand way (thank you Pink Floyd) must be thought of as egregious. For we will never pass this way again (thank you Seals & Crofts).

      To live a creative, fulfilling life, we must find the time, even when there isn’t any time. Put down the phone, turn away from the noise, and focus on the inviolable core hiding behind that superfluous material that must be chiseled away to find (with a nod to Michelangelo). We have the time we have, we have our dreams we wish to pursue in that given time. It’s up to us to realize those dreams. It’s our mission if we choose to accept it (thank you… oh forget it). Just keep weaving, friend. For now is all we have.

    • Learning to Fly

      “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
      — Kurt Vonnegut

      A soul in tension that’s learning to fly
      Condition grounded but determined to try
      Can’t keep my eyes from the circling skies
      Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
      — Pink Floyd, Learning to Fly

      Any self-respecting rock n’ roll fan knows that there are a few songs with the title Learning to Fly, and I love them all. We can argue about which gets your heart rate racing more, or any such thing like that, but for my money Pink Floyd’s song is the best of the bunch lyrically. Foo Fighters fans and Tom Petty aficionados might quibble, and the shear number of covers of Petty’s song indicate popular opinion on the matter, but there: I’ve said it. And yes, I digress.

      To master anything in this life we must at some point leap into the unknown and find out how we fare. Mostly we fall on our face in those early days. We either quit and play another game or we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get to it again. Even writing that I felt the overpowering cliche of familiar metaphor wash over me (sorry). But if the metaphor fits, use it.

      The whole point of this game is discovery. Try everything, learn which things work well for us and lean into them with gusto. With enough leaps we become adept at adaptation. Sure, some people have more talent than us, but persistence matters too. Skills may be learned. The rest is just breaking through the mind games of categorization and imposter syndrome. The fact is, some people will always put us in a certain bucket (people like that don’t do things like this), but mostly we do it to ourselves first. Just go do it and be ready for the stumble (see metaphor above).

      I write this knowing that there’s some new cliff I’ll need to jump off sooner or later, that I may learn to fly yet again. Life is a succession of such cliffs, and we may grow a pair or live with being ground-based creatures. We all feel like earth-bound misfits in the beginning of anything new. There’s only one way to soar though, and so we must toe up to the edge and lean into the next. It’s the only way we’ll ever fly.

    • Considering the Music of 1973

      Oh, give me the beat, boys, and free my soul
      I want to get lost in your rock ‘n’ roll
      And drift away

      Dobie Gray didn’t write Drift Away, Mentor Williams wrote it. But Dobie made it an international hit. The right mix of sing along, stirring lyrics and his silky soulful voice made it magical. I go about with life, forgetting about a song like this for a time, and then hear it on the radio or shuffled on a playlist of songs and it washes over me all over again, bringing me back to the first memories of hearing it. Dobie’s version was released in 1973, by all measures a very good year for music, with some of the greatest songs ever written released that year.

      Consider these ten 1973 classics:
      Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)
      Ramblin Man
      Let’s Get It On
      Just You ‘N’ Me
      Angie
      Money
      Bad, Bad Leroy Brown
      Over the Hills and Far Away
      Jet
      Love, Reign o’er Me

      And that’s just scratching the surface. Big albums were released in 1973, including Dark Side of the Moon, Band on the Run, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Houses of the Holy and Quadrophenia. Individual songs were brilliant, but this was the peak era of albums, when the entire record was a work of art gift-wrapped in an album cover to cherish. Radio latched on to songs and made them hits, but the fans were eagerly listening to deep cuts on the best albums and finding gold.

      The world itself was upside down in 1973, with Watergate beginning to boil up, the Paris Peace Agreement to get the United States out of Vietnam, inflation running amuck, and our parents dressing us in some crazy multicolor outfits. But hey, at least we had the music. And if you were a kid growing up in the early 70’s you were immersed in some of the greatest music ever created.

      1973 was a stacked year in a string of stacked years for rock and roll. Scan the music released in any year from 1965 to 1975 and you can create a heck of a playlist. These were the golden years for rock ‘n’ roll, when each release, and each year, tried to raise the bar. Popular music tried to stay hip and part of the action, and sometimes a song would rise up and become that classic for the ages. If we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that popular doesn’t always equal good, and there were some really bad songs hitting the charts in each of those years too, but those tend to drift away, don’t they? As with life, we tend to remember the best things. Like great songs. You know a melody can move me…

    • Our Cosmic Dance Together

      “Move on to the next moment, uninfluenced by the previous one… eternal life is now, in the timeless now.” – Anthony De Mello

      It’s that time of year again, when you start thinking about time passing.  It’s not just the end of a year, it’s the end of a decade.  Whoa. Another decade passed by?   So it goes.  Ten spins through space around the sun; our cosmic dance together.  The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older…  Ain’t that the truth.  But so what?  What’s timeless anyway?  Granite?  The ocean?  Khakis? We’re all just spinning around on the same planet as it moves around the sun, and doing the best we can in our moment.

      “All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself.” – Eckhart Tolle

      The more trips you take around the sun the more at ease you become with yourself.  At least for many of us.  There are plenty of people who grow more insecure with age, as if their entire identity is wrapped up in youthful beauty or athletic talent or the hustle of burning the candle at both ends.  There’s a Twitter debate going on right now about how successful people work 80+ hours per week.  That’s not my definition of success, that’s my definition of serfdom.  I’ve worked in toxic cultures before, and anyone telling you to sacrifice your life for work is toxic. Time is the ultimate currency, why give yours to a con artist with big promises? Better to dance to your own beat, I think. Eventually we all have to leave the dance floor, so why not enjoy it while we’re on it?

      So our odds of seeing 2020 improve by the hour, but if you aren’t learning and growing all you get is a better pair of New Year’s Eve glasses than 2019 offered. I’ve grown a lot this year, and I’m optimistic about the future too. Hopefully we all arrive back at this point on our next trip around the sun better for the journey. Whatever that time brings, I plan on appreciating each moment.