…then linger around those you want to be like.
Linger around your Muse.
Linger around love, leadership, and whatever a combination of the two looks like.
Then move.
Dreams don’t come to fruition via osmosis.
There isn’t a gift under a tree that compares to the gift(s) under your skin.
Or put another way, your music can’t be purchased. It’s in you and simply waiting for you to unwrap it, give it room to breathe, and compose itself.
To know and act on this daily is the path to sleeping in heavenly peace.
You could list yours and I could list mine, and chances are that our heroes, different as they may be, have a lot in common with each other.
We bestow the name hero to those that show us tenacity, hustle, love, selflessness, compassion, inspiration, imagination, loyalty, and the like. You can’t hand these things off…they can only be rubbed off on another.
Want to give a gift to someone? Share with them they’re heroism in your life.
Few gifts linger longer than someone speaking truth and gratitude into one’s music they make.
In search of the modern-day dream of its time, Mark Twain headed to Nevada from Missouri with his brother to mine for gold. The year was 1861 and for two weeks the two of them hopped from stage-coach to stage-coach across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Imagine this.
Imagine no air conditioning. Imagine the smell and shake of the stage coaches for days. Imagine no cell phones. Imagine no iPad to occupy your time for 14 plus days of travel to dig, live, and find ‘the dream.’
Now imagine the anticipation. Imagine the stories Twain had heard about others finding gold. It’s safe to assume, the closer he got to the Nevada line, the more robust the anticipation grew. Imagine each stage-coach becoming more and more full with people chasing the same dream. You can almost hear the choir-like chants for gold cant’ you? And remember, there was no Las Vegas at this time to fall back on if he was unable to find gold. It would be another 50 years until the city of Las Vegas would be incorporated. Truly, this was the Wild, undiscovered, West.
Long story short, Twain made it Nevada and dug, and dug, and dug, and dug, and dug, and dug.
No gold.
One of my favorite quotes is from the book of Twain: “The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you figure out why.”
If there’s TiVo in Heaven, I’m hopeful that one day I can see the see the scene when Twain slammed the shovel one last time into the side of a mountain and simultaneously felt and found that it was himself that he was really searching for…not the gold. That was the day and moment he figured out why.
I hope and pray that you’ve had a similar moment.
Happenstance eventually got him to San Francisco, by way of Nevada, and there begins the story of Mark Twain and the man we know as the father of American literature.
To begin with, what happens now is the primary predictor of what will happen next.
Take this a step further, and what you do now will play a huge role, if not the primary role, in what you do next. What you hear now will effect what you hear next. What you see now will effect what you see next. How you are and where you are tomorrow will always point back to now.
We need to get lost and found in the now.
Lost in the sense that it’s the creative playtime where our art is thought, designed, crafted, and given to the world.
Found in the sense that our focus is locked in because we know that ‘now’ is the line that connects us to the next dot.
We’re artists. We’re givers. We’re dot connectors.
Now is here.
Now is the time.
Now is what we’ve got.
People always want to know what’s next. I say we get to know our nows (that’s the brave and tough work), and what’s next will naturally show its face.
