A Hard Stop Helps Us See

Dear friends,

I’m jostling between tasks as I prepare to dash back to the UK for my father’s 80th birthday.

One of the curiosities when you have to place a hard stop on your activities is that you see how much you have cooking at any one time.

For me, this reveals the blessings and the comedy of my life.

The prevailing advice nowadays is that if you want to achieve something, you must “niche down”.

And yet, our lives are composed of a desperation of fragments.

How these fragments refract the light makes the colour of our lives.

We yearn to simplify, sometimes wishing to change the very features which make our story.

Be careful of sacrificing who you are for who you might be.

It strikes me that we live in an either-or frame of mind about this these days.

That our yearnings for something “other” distract us from what is.

But who we might be emerges out of the self we are now.

Tending to that reality is too often forgotten in favour of an abstraction, an abstraction which distracts us from:

• what we can do

• how we can do it

• why we want to do it

Putting a hard stop to things today has forced me to feel grateful for the madness of my life.

When I am lost in my own day dream, I lose sight of what I have now for what I want then.

Since I started working on my new album, something reared in me musically.

And while I have not yet quite worked out what it is I want (or even what I am aiming for) - I am aware I am once again in league with the demon.

It is that demon who, in representing the threshold of what I might be, gets frustrated with the vagaries of the every day - that is, the things we have to do to conduct our lives.

My battle with him is that I know where he leads me - and it is to chaos.

“Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast, each seeks to rule without the other.”

Goethe’s Faust

No, you will not destroy my relationships, structures, order, ways I live, and my gradual grip on practical life.

The dreamer is always at odds with the pragmatist.

And if it can be said that they operate as a pendulum, my sways hard.

The paradox, though, is that our chaos provides us with the greatest opportunity.

Because it is the problems in our own life that give us the basis to help others.

If we can just solve them, that gives us our knowledge base. And our knowledge base is what links us to others.

We forget it, but the particular problems life gives us are our research.

I read this week:

“Find your weakness and exploit it in the service of others”.

Larry Winget

Yes, our weakness is our opportunity.
Yes, our madness is our story.
Yes, our gratitude is our prayer.

My life in the arts has rarely left me a day when there has not been some type of challenge.

At times, it has been exhausting.

But at all times, it has provoked me into becoming who I am.

We worry about success and failure, but it is living itself that matters.

Today, as a hard stop is brought about for a few days, I’m grateful to my own unfolding story, littered with clashing elements as it is.

A hard stop helps us see again, to take a step back, and say thank you.

I’m off to celebrate my Dad and the 80 years of his life today.

I’m grateful for every day of his and each day of mine.

With love,

Jim

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”

Soren Kierkegaard