All humans are musical. Why else would the Lord give you a beating heart?
The secret is not to make your music louder, but to make the world quieter.
This is life. Things get taken away. You will learn to start over many times – or you will be useless.
Take any emotion – love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions – if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them – you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.
As life goes on, you will join other bands, some through friendship, some through romance, some through neighborhoods, school, an army. Maybe you will all dress the same, or laugh at your own private vocabulary. Maybe you will flop on couches backstage, or share a boardroom table, or crowd around a galley inside a ship. But in each band you join, you will play a distinct part, and it will affect you as much as you affect it.
You cannot write if you do not read,” the blind man said. “You cannot eat if you do not chew. And you cannot play if you do not” – he grabbed for the boy’s hand – “listen.
Consider the word “time.” We use so many phrases with it. Pass time. Waste time. Kill time. Lose time. In good time. About time. Take your time. Save time. A long time. Right on time. Out of time. Mind the time. Be on time. Spare time. Keep time. Stall for time. There are as many expressions with “time” as there are minutes in a day. But once, there was no word for it at all. Because no one was counting. Then Dor began. And everything changed.
But you cannot change your past, no matter how you craft your future.
Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creatures endures. A fear of time running out.
Personally, I always wondered about authors and celebrities who loudly declared there was no God. It was usually when they were healthy and popular and being listened to by crowds. What happens, I wondered, in the quiet moments before death? By then, they have lost the stage, the world has moved on. If suddenly, in their last gasping moments, through fear, a vision, a late enlightenment, they change their minds about God, who would know?
Sometimes I think the greatest talent of all is perseverance.
Love comes when you least expect it. Love comes when you most need it. Love comes when you are ready to receive it or can no longer deny it.
Tell me about your family,” I said. And so she did. I listened intently as my mother went through each branch of the tree. Years later, after the funeral, Maria had asked me questions about the family – who was related to whom – and I struggled. I couldn’t remember. A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way.
Every loss leaves a hole in your heart.
This is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them. It’s what I missed so much when my mother died – what I call your ‘spiritual security’ – knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame.
You humans are always locking each other away. Cells. Dungeons. Some of your earliest jails were sewers, where men sloshed in their own waste. No other creature has this arrogance – to confine its own. Could you imagine a bird imprisoning another bird? A horse jailing a horse? As a free form of expression, I will never understand it. I can only say that some of my saddest sounds have been heard in such places. A song inside a cage is never a song. It is a plea.
Secrets. We think by keeping them, we’re controlling things, but all the while, they’re controlling us.
Truth is light. Lies are shadows. Music is both.
You cannot ask things to do what they are not meant to do. Eventually, they will break.
There is a reason you glance up when you first hear a melody, or tap your foot to the sound of a drum. All humans are musical. Why else would the Lord give you a beating heart?