Strange days we’re living in. Wouldn’t you agree? Turmoil, uncertainty, anxiety and fear – it’s easy for us to become overwhelmed. We are assailed on all sides with messages, information, news, instructions, censorship, commands, controls, obstructions and diversions. Too many of us are at the mercy of a tide that’s sweeping us along to somewhere we don’t want to be. For some it may be a temporary diversion and they can pull it back and steer their own course. For others – it is too powerful to fight against. Battling upstream against a raging torrent.
And some of us watch this drama of others unfolding from afar – thinking we are free of the rampaging waters. And yet we too are in shackles of our own making – and we don’t even know it.
I wonder – how many of us will get to the end of our lives and suddenly realise that we’d been on the wrong road, that we’d been living somebody else’s life – instead of our own – following someone else’s vision instead of our own personal dream. Dimming our own light so that others may shine. Too many, I believe.
How many of us are truly ourselves – really, truly authentic? And how many of us are instead at the mercy and whim of others – whether that be an individual or a group or an organisation, or a set of values or cultural beliefs driven deep into our subconscious?
True authenticity – where the gap between our private self and our public self is as narrow as it can be – this is key. This is the nuts and bolts of it all. This is where the magic is. The further we are away from our true selves and our true nature the more alienated we become from ourselves and each other – with disastrous consequences for us as individuals and for society. We have leaders who are noisy on the outside but utterly empty inside, who don’t know themselves – attempting to lead people who don’t know themselves. The blind leading the blind, who are too blind to see that they are blind.
So much of human unhappiness stems from the misguided and misunderstood need to conform to a generic, uniform, homogeneous, average, dull stereotype. We are forced to become a label, a number, a category, a biometric ID. By conforming – saying yes when we mean no, or no when we mean yes – or by remaining silent when every nerve in our body is crying out to speak up – or by doing or saying things only to please others, settling for mediocrity – we die to our true selves and the world is a poorer place without what would have been our unique contribution.
For our own perceived failings we can blame society, the government, schools, church, work, your boss, parents – anyone. But none of that matters. If we’re lost – we’re lost.
The only one who can find you again is you. No-one can do it for you. How can they – when they don’t even know themselves.
I am reminded of some very profound lyrics to the Beatles song – The Inner Light – by George Harrison. These words were themselves inspired by the writing of the ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao-Tzu who lived around 2,500 years ago. Their profoundness is made more so, given the current restrictions on our physical freedoms:
Without going out of your door
You can know all things on earth
Without looking out of your window
You could know the ways of heaven
The farther one travels
The less one knows
This was the B-side (remember B-sides?!) to Paul McCartney’s Lady Madonna and was undoubtedly out of the spotlight when the single was released in 1968- and yet the words – even from the original ancient Lao-Tzu text – convey a deep truth still today:
We have to first look inwards to then see what truly lies without.
Sound of Mind?
As a musician I instinctively express my thoughts and ideas through music first. I guess it’s what I feel most comfortable with. Writing is a follow-on from that. The piece of instrumental music on the link below – Sound of Mind – is something that I wrote to articulate the ideas which I have expressed in this article. I wrote this music several years ago, however – long before I wrote these words – and when I was recording it and arranging the different sections, I found it naturally fell into three parts based on the instrumentation and intensity of the whole piece –
- Future Promise – the time when we are charting our course and we dream of our future lives and what promise the future might hold for us. It’s about hope, mystery, wonder, excitement, ambition.
- State of Dysfunction. The start of this section is slightly darker in tone. Now the state has its claws in you. The government has you. Society has you. The illusion of physical freedom is lifted. This is pretty much how it is for the majority. Especially today. Welcome to the treadmill. Or in the words of Pink Floyd – Welcome to the Machine.
- Rediscovery. When we stop searching for answers and validation outside of ourselves and instead we look inwards and realise that the answer was there all the time. The piano motif from the start is repeated here to signify a return journey. This life was never meant to be an intellectual journey, but an experiential one – and we are the ones doing the experiencing. The experience is the journey. And the experience can only happen in the eternal present moment. There is no past. There is no future. There is no time. There is only now. Every second spent thinking about yesterday or tomorrow is energy taken from your existence today and thus diminishing your life experience. This moment is the only place where you can exist.
The music in this last section builds up to a crescendo of guitars, strings, synths and percussion to a big finish before dying away to a soft piano chord as the music resolves itself. As life resolves itself.
We should not take life so seriously. It’s just a cosmic game. That’s the big joke. It can never be solved. Because if it did, we would cease to exist. The game would be over.
So you see, there really is nothing to worry about. It was always meant to be this way. So how can it not be ok?
Enjoy the game. Enjoy the ride. And don’t die with your music still in you.
free 2 think zone 