Looks like
So I’ve been trying to write this one out for over a week. Sometimes writing is like jump-starting an old truck; it just takes a few pushes and kicks down the street… and time. Last week, I woke up in the early hours with a Bob Schneider song playing in my head, specifically this part of it: “I've got a world to unwind before I ever sit still, I've got so much to put down before that's all she wrote, I've got so much to give before my heart ain't so broke, I've got to find myself before i can ever be alone, and there’s an ocean of reason that i cant explain, and there’s the weight of the world like a ball and chain, and there’s a big black hole inside me that I've filled up with stones there’s a man I’ve never met who looks a lot like me…there’s a thing called peace of mind that I have never known. I’ve got a long way to get before I get back home.” And it stuck there for the rest of the week. The kind of music where you find yourself saying, “yes, my thoughts exactly.”
It’s the ”man I’ve never met who looks a lot like me,” that resonates the most. In part because I feel like I am still just beginning to meet the man I was made to be when I was made to be. And my sense is I will spend the rest of my life coming to this conclusion. After all, I thought for sure I’d figured it out many times before over the past 20 years.
Then I was reading T.S. Eliot’s The Rock while grabbing morning coffee, looking out over a field in Crested Butte. When I read these words: ”The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness,
Knowledge of speech, but not silence;”
In the stillness of the morning, I then realized just how much I’d been moving, busy with “invention, endless experiment” caught up in the cycles of ideas and action and so not allowing space to know stillness and silence. And it is in these moments, as much as the bustle and friends and work, which I come to know the man I never met who looks a lot like me.
It’s both/and that I think any of us come to know who we are. The extremist would say it is only in silence and solitude, and they would be partly right. Their voice is attractive because we live such busy lives hardly alone, but often lonely.
The other end of the spectrum would say we only know through relationships with others. And that, too, is partly true. I’ve definitely experienced that reality time and again, often against my will. I’ve experienced it most acutely these past few months in relationship with Jenn, and even that not always what I’d wish for, but good all the same.
If you’d told me back in my English Major days that profound truths would come from the mixing of T.S. Eliot and Bob Schneider, I would have surely said it was crazy talk. Yet, the man that now looks a lot like me sees more and more how truth shows up in the strangest places….
It’s the ”man I’ve never met who looks a lot like me,” that resonates the most. In part because I feel like I am still just beginning to meet the man I was made to be when I was made to be. And my sense is I will spend the rest of my life coming to this conclusion. After all, I thought for sure I’d figured it out many times before over the past 20 years.
Then I was reading T.S. Eliot’s The Rock while grabbing morning coffee, looking out over a field in Crested Butte. When I read these words: ”The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness,
Knowledge of speech, but not silence;”
In the stillness of the morning, I then realized just how much I’d been moving, busy with “invention, endless experiment” caught up in the cycles of ideas and action and so not allowing space to know stillness and silence. And it is in these moments, as much as the bustle and friends and work, which I come to know the man I never met who looks a lot like me.
It’s both/and that I think any of us come to know who we are. The extremist would say it is only in silence and solitude, and they would be partly right. Their voice is attractive because we live such busy lives hardly alone, but often lonely.
The other end of the spectrum would say we only know through relationships with others. And that, too, is partly true. I’ve definitely experienced that reality time and again, often against my will. I’ve experienced it most acutely these past few months in relationship with Jenn, and even that not always what I’d wish for, but good all the same.
If you’d told me back in my English Major days that profound truths would come from the mixing of T.S. Eliot and Bob Schneider, I would have surely said it was crazy talk. Yet, the man that now looks a lot like me sees more and more how truth shows up in the strangest places….