"I am lost and I can't even say why...But I have an emptiness way deep down inside and I can say that I've tried..."
-Neil Diamond
For as long as I can remember I have felt out of place. Not unlike an extra in someone else's movie, I kind of meandered from place to place slinking by unnoticed as best I could. I'm the guy behind you in line at the post office or the person you see when you randomly look at the car next to you on the highway. And I'm looking back which is weird. It takes a while for me to come out of my shell. I don't get comfortable with someone right away except in the rarest of circumstances. I don't think there's anything wrong with me. I'm pretty sure at least. Who knows. One thing I almost always feel is lost. I try to find myself and most times end up with more questions than answers. I'm always trying to answer things in a frank black and white way. Ambiguity isn't fun for me. Because of that I go to great lengths to set my ducks in a row. Now if you know anything about ducks you'd know they are hard to control so doing that is tough. Sometimes unfortunately things get sidetracked or worse colossally derailed. Those times are chances to regroup and see what we are trying to accomplish and also see how we can improve our strategy and execution.
But why do we feel so it's sometimes? Where does that feeling come from? I know a lot of people in my circle who have ideas. Big huge ideas. A lot of these ideas are great and would be amazing to see come to fruition. Some of them suck and I don't totally get but that's their journey not mine so whatever dude. But still they feel lost. And the fact is they spread themselves too thin. When you don't have direction and just blindly try to follow something without at least a base and a couple of minutes thought you are going nowhere. I read a lot of rock biographies. All of them have a resonant theme: school wasn't for me and I didn't like having people tell me what to do so I left school and started a band. A lot of them also seemed to have wasted a lot of time and took a lot of chances without taking care of their base to soften their fall. No I know what you're thinking; rock and roll is all about chaos and there's nothing less cool than planning. Bruce left school and is now the modern king of rock and roll going strong at 67 playing four plus hour shows. But the reality is for every Bruce Springsteen there are a hundred "Anvils". If you don't know who they are I'll explain:
Anvil is a Canadian hard rock band who have been touring for three or four decades and never made it. They kept at it and after a documentary was made about them a few years back they had marginal success no hit records and played dive bar after dive bar. Then they got national exposure and do festivals all over the world and have had their records remastered and released by a major label. It took forever but they finally made it. They're the real life Spinal Tap. But it could have been a disaster. Anvil had a drive to succeed and did it. Beyond anvil there are other bands who ever made it. Bands that work day jobs to make ends meet. Bands that aren't giving up and have a lot of work to go before they make it if they ever do make it. The difference is Anvil got lucky. Success is bred from equal parts hard work and luck in my opinion. Take an example of starting our own band. We need all the essential parts: guitar, drums, singer, bass and tambourine. You have to hit at the right time and get noticed by the right audience. That doesn't mean you aren't working hard if you aren't noticed it just means you didn't get noticed. The drive it takes to get there, wherever there is , is amazing. You see it in people's work. Songs that are based on a bad day. It's the same reason why a band kind of starts to suck when they make it. There's a refreshing quality in songs about driven people. When you've been at it twenty years it's kind of hard to write about being depressed and disconnected from the world. (Unless you've got some publicized issues that is). It's hard to relate to people who have made it and are complaining about alienation and the harshness of life. The truth is the struggle is real and people can feel that way at any level at any point but it's hard to imagine someone like say James Hettfield sitting in his house with his 30 guitars hating his life. So maybe we shouldn't judge that way. Maybe instead remember that these are people who have been there and might just be trying to help. People who are sharing their stories and emotions to make others not feel so alone. Or so lost. Because being lost sucks as I've said before. It's frustrating and lonely. Sometimes those feelings hit and we can't exactly say why we feel that way. And sometimes you need someone to say it aloud to make you see how you're feeling too. We're connected and driven people. But just like in our own endeavors we need a base. Our base in humanity is each other. The connections. When you're lost in the woods sometimes you find your way out. Other times, someone finds you. Everyone gets found every once in a while. I don't feel as alienated anymore because I frankly stopped thinking about it so much. And feeling more connected to people and seeing that others feel lost too made me feel not so lost. We are joined together in our lost-ness. A brotherhood of the lost.
Knowing that other people have similar issues and experiences is helpful. Your issues are unique to you but they are common to us. Nobody feels how you feel but you but others can empathize with you. It's good to let them go because you can turn you and me into us and we. So stop focusing on being lost and try to see what's around you and we can maybe get found.
And then, when we find each other, why don't we start a band? We'll call ourselves Anvil 2. And I call playing the tambourine.
See you Thursday.
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