PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE
Lee Ann Womack sings:
I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance
Never settle for the path of least resistance
Living might mean taking chances
But they're worth taking
Lovin' might be a mistake
But it's worth making
Don't let some hell bent heart
Leave you bitter
When you come close to selling out
Reconsider
Give the heavens above
More than just a passing glance
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance
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Lee Ann Womack is a star. Julie Blake is not a star, but Julie is fearless. If you don't believe me, click here (http://www.stevechandler.com/Fearless.html) to see the page she has made AND THE HEARTFELT WORDS SHE HAS WRITTEN to you, see the music video she has made, and hear the song she has written and performed.
Julie tells her story far better than I could. I'm just grateful that of all the passing winds in the world her sail momentarily caught mine and she used my work as inspiration to find the brave passionate music that was inside of her all along.
Julie is a testament to the concept of not dying with your music still inside you. And I don't mean dying that last death that releases you from the end days of your life, I mean that death TODAY that will spread through my day if I leave my music inside me.
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"Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out."
~Oliver Wendell Holmes
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I hope you never settle for the path of least resistance, but rather GO for it. Dance when you have the chance. Sing whenever you can.
I read so many books about mind body and spirit. Books that tell you to be sure to integrate all three and balance your life. Take care of your body, your mind and your spirit. But what about your music? No one mentions that. Too embarrassing, and too beautiful. Too beautiful to talk about.
We strive too much. We don't take time to create...time to float, wander and roam, as Dr. B. says.
Nathaniel Branden has written, "It is generally recognized that creativity requires leisure, an absence of rush, time for the mind and imagination to float and wander and roam, time for the individual to descend into the depths of his or her psyche, to be available to barely audible signals rustling for attention. Long periods of time may pass in which nothing seems to be happening. But we know that kind of space must be created if the mind is to leap out of its accustomed ruts, to part from the mechanical, the known, the familiar, the standard, and generate a leap into the new."
~Nathaniel Branden
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My friend Fred Knipe was a professional songwriter whose true music was comedy, and later in life he elevated his music to the status of career and became a full-time successful comedian and comic playwright.
So not only does your music balance and nurture whatever career you are now in, it often later will rise to the top and become your new career. If you keep your commitment to it. Commitment is everything.
So many people, people I've seen in my own family, become so monomaniacally focused on career that they leave no room for their music and when it's time to retire they feel lost and adrift without any music. My father increased his drinking to drown that part of his soul that had not been expressed. Very sad to watch.
Your music is nothing less than your soul's yearning to self-express. So it's much more than just a little diversion or hobby to keep you entertained.
Music is heaven. Those who cast it aside in the name of becoming pain-ridden victims of mundane concerns are the "hell-bent hearts" that try to get you down on their level. Victims of circumstance. Expecting so much of others, and asking so little of themselves. (I've been there. A song took me away from there.)
The universe is a musical, if we could only see it. If we could only hear it, we would dance to it every day.
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Callin' out around the world
are you ready for a brand new beat?
summer's here and the time is right
for dancin' in the streets................*****************************************
And yes I mean that quite literally! Please read this:
"Who would think that widely scattered groups of children in a school playground could be in sync. Yet this is precisely the case.
"One of my students selected as a project an exercise in what can be learned from film. Hiding in an abandoned automobile, which he used as a blind, he filmed children in an adjacent school yard during recess. As he viewed the film, his first impression was the obvious one: a film of children playing in different parts of the school playground. Then -- watching the film several times at different speeds, he began to notice one very active little girl who seemed to stand out from the rest. She was all over the place.
"Concentrating on the girl, my student noticed that whenever she was near a cluster of children the members of that group were in sync not only with each other but with her. Many viewings later, he realized that this girl, with her skipping and dancing and twirling, was actually orchestrating movements of the entire playground! There was something about the pattern of movement which translated into a beat -- like a silent movie of people dancing.
"Furthermore, the beat of this playground was familiar! There was a rhythm he had encountered before. He went to a friend who was a rock music aficionado, and the two of them began to search for the beat. It wasn't long until the friend reached out to a nearby shelf, took down a cassette and slipped it into a tape deck. That was it! It took a while to synchronize the beginning of the film with the recording -- a piece of contemporary rock music -- but once started, the entire three and a half minutes of the film clip stayed in sync with the taped music! Not a beat or a frame of the film was out of sync!
"How does one explain something like this? It doesn't fit most people's notions of either playground activity or where music comes from. Discussing composers and where they get their music with a fellow faculty member at Northwestern University, I was not surprised to learn that for him, and for many other musicians, music represents a sort of rhythmic consensus, a consensus of the core culture. It was clear that the children weren't playing and moving in tune to a particular piece of music. They were moving to a basic beat which they shared at the time. They also shared it with the composer, who must have plucked it out of the sea of rhythm in which he too was immersed. He couldn't have composed that piece if he hadn't been in tune with the core culture.
"Things like this are puzzling and difficult because so little is known technically about human synchrony. However, I have noted similar synchrony in my own films of people in public with no relationship with each other. Yet, they were syncing in subtle ways. The extraordinary thing is that my student was able to identify that beat.
"When he showed his film to our seminar, however, even though his explanation of what he had done was perfectly lucid, the members of the seminar had difficulty understanding what had actually happened. One school superintendent spoke of the children as "dancing to the music"; another wanted to know if the children were "humming the tune." They were voicing the commonly held belief that music is something that is "made up" by a composer, who then passes on "his creation" to others, who, in turn, diffuse it to the larger society. The children were moving, but as with the symphony orchestra, some participants' parts were at times silent.
"Eventually all participated and all stayed in sync, but the music was in them. They brought it with them to the playground as a part of shared culture. They had been doing that sort of thing all their lives, beginning with the time they synchronized their movements to their mother's voice even before they were born. . . .
"Before the Renaissance, God was conceived of as sound or vibration. This is understandable because the rhythm of a people may yet prove to be the most binding of all the forces that hold human beings together. As a matter of fact, I have come to the conclusion that the human species lives in a sea of rhythm, ineffable to some, but quite tangible to others.
"This explains why some composers really do seem to be able to tap into that sea and express for the people the rhythms that are felt but not yet expressed as music."
From The Dance of Life, The Other Dimension of Time,
by Edward T. Hall, pp. 154-156,
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All we need is music, sweet musicThere'll be music everywhere
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