then what do you make?
Full disclosure, I’m not sure of the exact answer, or if there is one specific answer. But it’s probably, metaphorically, some form of noise. Something unnoticed. Something lost in the mix.
A life that makes a difference is one that points or leads in a way in which people or things are not the same after being encountered to it.
Your music is the difference you’re here to make.
Noise bounces.
Music sticks.
Finally, The Game has a name: Change.
I believe you are a musician.
I believe there is song after song after song waiting to be awakened in you.
I believe there’s far too many people telling you what to believe your music should be.
I believe your music is your call.
I believe finding your music is your true and holy vocation.
I believe the vocation of finding your music will help move others into the same pursuit, resulting in a world of less noise and more music.
I believe your music is why you are here.
I believe we will all be better after having been exposed to your riffs, rhythm, and rhyme.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.”
A successful life is one that says ‘here’s my music.’
Emphasis on my (which is yours).
You need not borrow that which is already in you.
That thing inside of you: That passion. That purpose. That hope. That ideal. That pull in your soul.
Wake it up.
It may take a person to awaken this in you. Find them.
It may take a reminder to awaken this in you. Set it.
It may take a book to awaken this in you. Read it.
It may take solitude to awaken this in you. Pursue it.
It may take you to awaken this in you. Find a mirror.
Awake.
Rise.
Shine.
I found an excerpt over the weekend from a letter that Albert Einstein wrote to his eleven year old son in 1915. At that time Einstein was thirty-six. He wrote…
…I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal. . . .
There’s a lot of beauty unfolding here in these words. For one, Einstein is promoting the creative. Could it be that we learn more while our imagination is decoding the world around us then we do reading what has already been decoded? Secondly, he asks his son to shelf the sheet music and get lost in and with the keys of the piano. What romance there is in the three-step waltz of work, art, and possibility. And lastly, Einstein reveres time. He’s aware of just how holy it is and how today is all that is confirmed in our stories.
Of course we can’t always accomplish such a feat, but what a worthy goal of our days to enter into moments where we fully pursue our art, our parenting, our leading, and our serving with such holiness that we lose track of time, but walk away with a vault of codes as to how things are.
LTMP.
Ashton.Gustafson 