I’m a very, how shall I say this... specific dancer. Put me and my moves at Burning Man or a Phish show and no one would bat an eyelash. Put me in a club with pulsing house music and I’m, let’s say: out of my element. When I can get out of the prison of my head there are few things I love more than dancing. When self-consciousness descends – when I’m watching myself or fearing others are watching and judging – I seize up.
This is a fear worthy of transcendence. Studies are showing sitting is very bad for us. We’re meant to move. Einstein’s greatest discoveries came to him during walks. He was apparently a hyperactive child who had trouble sitting still. For him, cognition was connected to motion. One provoked the other.
I feel like one of the cruelest things we can do is tamp down another person’s exuberance and freedom of expression. A friend recently told me she loved to draw as a kid and one day someone told her she was quite a mediocre artist and she seized up and never drew again. How many of us have done something joyfully un-self-conscious only to have it crushed by an ‘authority’ or ‘expert?’
By the time people hit forty, they’ve generally isolated their strengths. We tend to stick with what we’re good at because that’s what we’ve been rewarded for. And to get really underneath it: that’s how we’ve gotten love. Our trying-new-things muscles - so actively engaged as children - slowly atrophy. To learn to play an instrument or learn a new language demands that we be a novice. We’re going to hit more wrong notes than right notes, our grammar will be a mess. But how else are we to learn? We have to let ourselves be foolish and silly and imperfect and bad at things. I truly believe it’s one of the secrets to life.
Starting to play guitar at my advanced age – I started at forty two – was a kind of rebellion against the part of me that told me I shouldn’t or couldn’t.
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I loved this tweet from songwriter Dan Wilson tweet: "Figuring something out - rather than presenting something you’ve totally figured out - that’s what people want to hear."
Ben and I tend to announce at some point during Radnor & Lee shows that we are a ‘mistakes-permissable’ band. It’s partly a reminder to ourselves to stay loose and not be felled by perfection, but it’s also a reminder to the audience that they’re participating in a thing unfolding in real time, and we can all enjoy the process without being gripped by the result. Life is so much more fun that way! I know from all my years in the theater that the most electric and alive moments on stage are when something goes wrong: the missing prop, the flubbed line. Actors and audience come to life in a wholly new way. Something real is happening.
Maybe what I’m saying is obvious, but it’s worth considering how resistant we are to taking on new things the older we get. We like what we like, we do what we do, and we stick with that. But the miracle of playing guitar for me is that it makes me feel actually younger. Not like a fifteen-year old starting a band. I’m not delusional. I mean it fills me up with energy and a fresh sense of possibility. Life always offers the promise of the new.
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Have you guys ever seen the clip of the band Future Islands performing their song “Seasons” on David Letterman? It became a viral sensation a few years back almost entirely due to the supremely strange, hypnotic performance of the lead singer Sam Herring, and also - probably - for how delighted Letterman seemed at the end of it (“I’ll take all of that you got.”) If Herring was nervous about appearing on national television it certainly doesn’t show. He doesn’t even seem all that concerned with being liked or appreciated. He simply looks like a guy who must sing this song and do these moves or he’ll die.
That aching urgency coupled with his apparent absence of self-consciousness has made it one of my favorite cultural artifacts. When I first saw it I had no idea what I was watching. I didn’t even know if it was good. I just knew something was going on with that guy and dammit, he was going to get it out while the cameras were rolling. I’ve rewatched it countless times.
It's bracing to witness this level of passion and ferocious commitment. Because courage is contagious (So is fear, incidentally) When we say something is ‘inspiring’ we mean it fills us up with spirit. And spirit is new, spirit is alive, spirit is nourishing, spirit is in a state of perpetual reinvention.
I was talking with Rob Bell about this recently, that the biblical prohibition against idolatry might essentially be saying “Don’t put borders and boundaries upon that which has none.” Spirit is always on-the-go, ever-replenishing. It refuses to be idle (idol!) On some level, our own stuckness is a kind of idolatry, a worship of stasis, a rejection of the call of spirit, which is always whispering: “Keep moving. Keep going.”
(Now lest anyone misunderstand this I don’t think spirit is whispering “Leave your husband and children and move to Bali.” I mean maybe that’s what spirit is whispering, but let’s assume for the moment that spirit is not trying to blow up your life but rather open up your life.)
I’m never going to dance like Prince or throw myself around a stage like Iggy Pop. I’m never going to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix or John Butler. But something is coming through and it feels best to simply honor it and see where it goes. I’m going to keep dancing and playing guitar and writing songs for no reason other than the fact that it gives me joy. We can trust joy. If it’s nourishing and sustainable and of some benefit to others, I think joy is a reliable GPS for our lives.
The man who taught me to meditate offered a slightly subtler version of this that I reflect upon often: “Follow the charm.” Life, I've found, is actually safer when I follow the charm and step boldly into the unknown. Cosmic forces unfailingly rise up to meet and support our bravery.
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I flipped for this book that Ben recommended, “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk" by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. It’s salacious and filthy and sad and fun, but also weirdly inspiring. A detail I loved: No one really knew how to play their instruments when they started their bands. That was almost beside the point. They were filled with energy and vitality and rage that needed an outlet. The yearning and ache came first, then the details.
Here's Legs McNeil on Punk: “This wonderful vital force that was articulated by the music was really about corrupting every form. It was not about being perfect, it was about saying that it was O.K. to be amateurish and funny, that real creativity came out of making a mess, it was about working with what you got in front of you and turning everything embarrassing, awful and stupid in your life to your advantage.”
Here's to making a mess.
Deep peace,
Josh
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