It has been said that ‘if we wish to get somewhere, it is first important to know where we are.’ Okay. I have done that. Now what? Well, perhaps I really didn’t do it and just want to get on with what is coming next in that ‘getting somewhere’ because that sounds a bit better than where I am. Why look at where I am, anyway?
Oliver Wendell Holmes has suggested that ‘many people die with their music still in them.’ Yipes, I don’t want to do that, that’s for sure, but…
You know, it’s damned difficult to survive in our Western society unless you become a part of the wheels of commerce that provide sufficient income. We work very hard and seem to barely get ahead of tomorrow’s unknown surprises. At least that is the model for life I and others have been trained to believe.
So how can I make sure I am expressing the ‘music inside me?’ The ‘starving artist’ concept is a real one, for the most part. “Why doesn’t he get a real job?” There are other life choices we find ourselves suppressing because they just do not allow for a reasonable life standard, as acceptable to others in our circle. How can we love a life that is so dependent on the financial returns, and not on what the soul is yearning to express?
So, society seems to be becoming less joyful, adding more and more boundaries. We shove more and more of what we would love to do with our lives, our ‘authentically wished for’ life, to the background or shadow side because we feel we have no time for it.
‘Someday, somehow,’ we will live what we truly love, but for now we gotta pay the bills.
What we have left, what we get to provide to our communities and the world is hardly what one could call a model for ‘being alive.’
Sadly, this becomes the part that has the most energy, that has the most control of one’s life. The part that I ‘almost lived’ now becomes something to fear or avoid and it requires energy to keep it suppressed. Not necessarily because it is bad or scary but because to attempt to live it will mean having to give up parts of what I have grown accustomed to, even if that accustomed part is a bit lifeless. The status quo?
We drag a bag of this ‘music’ behind us, filled with all those ‘don’t do’s’ that our parents, friends, and others have encouraged us to place there because it just doesn’t look good to express them. Maybe they represent failures to accomplish something in life. ‘Our life eventually loses its color, because all the color is in the bag.’
Is this all dismal and am I just being negative? You call it.
For me, it is an inkling into the part about ‘knowing where you are’ and as a first step of any inquiry, that may be what matters most. And it also matters that the inquiry continue so that one will remember what once made one’s heart sing.