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I think you made a virtue
Of flying in the wind
Where no one ever hurts you
'Til you're on the ground again
You keep on flying
Where things are always glad
And no one's ever sad
And all your dreams are always coming true
You keep on flying
Where things are always good
And life goes like it should
And all your dreams are always coming true
I think you made a virtue
Of sitting on the ground
Where no one ever hurts you
Cuz you're listening to the sound...
Of people singing
That things are always good
And life goes like it should
And all your dreams are always coming true
You keep on singing
That things are always glad
And life is never bad
And all your dreams are always coming true
Then you start to remember
The thing that brought you down
The thing I think she told you
That brought you down to the ground
Then you start to remember
The thing I think she said that she'd never say
The thing I think she told you
Before she shut her heart and flew away
But then you cry to remember
The thing you tried to forget
The thing I know she told you
But you still think it's not over yet
I think you made a virtue
Of floating on the clouds
Almost to the sunshine
High above the crowds
You keep on dreaming
That things go like they should
And life is always good
And all your dreams are always coming true
You keep on dreaming
That nothing's ever bad
And no one's ever sad
And everything she said is always true...
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The Best Advice to Graduates Ever - It Helped me Make the Best Song on Earth.
(What Can it Do for You, if You Follow it, Too..?)
>>>>>>>>>>>
* * *
ABOUT AU§TIN
by au§tin
JR (just initials, as I don't want people googling him to necessarily be led to a site about pop music!) has spent something like the past 18 years living at Mount Vernon (he has a house just down the hill from the historic house, on the property).This has been a perk of his job, as Director of Mount Vernon.
(He's just leaving the job as I write this, which is why he's on my mind...but it all relates to pop music - honest!)
To me, living at Mount Vernon seems almost magical. Like living at Buckingham Palace, or something. (For those from other countries who don't know, Mount Vernon was my great (etc) uncle George Washington's house.)
George Washington's noble yet humble character were instrumental in founding The United States of America, a country that was built on profound and beautiful ideals, such as George Washington's admonition to stay out of "foreign entanglements" - that is, not to engage in wars of any sort, except purely defensive ones (I use that example to point out that America has descended far from the way its founders, and especially George Washington, intended it to be. But that's another story...)
While I think JR's life seems magical (living at Mount Vernon!), JR, on the other hand, has regularly remarked that he felt my life was somehow magical. He often said that I was ineluctably lucky, my life seemed charmed to him. Well, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, I suppose...
But, in two senses I think he's not entirely wrong. I don't believe these two senses are unrelated, either(nor are they unrelated to pop music, as we shall see - no, honest!)
I'll just give one example of the first way he's right: I was in the Dhaka Airport recently, in Bangladesh, and...well, that I was there at all was amazing, the result of the most impossibly unlikely chain of events you could (n)ever imagine.
In the airport, what happened involved a girl with sparkling eyes whose ambition was to spend her life helping people, in a really specific way, that she told me about. It's a long story (so maybe I won't even tell it in full, here), but it is so very typical of my luck. I run into the most amazing people wherever I go. My best friends all seem so ideal as to be from something like Vonnegut's "karass".
My friends who I've met in the most unlikely places around the world are startlingly different on the surface, yet, deep down, all the same - awesome. Like George Washington, but prettier (!) (Okay, lots of my friends are girls...what can I say?!:D
More broadly, it often seems as if there is some kind of force that makes things happen in my life in a way that's a million times more amazing and magical than I could ever conceive or believe ahead of time (just one, but perhaps the most important example, being the amazing friends I have from everywhere....)
[NB - the very difficult lesson I've learnt from what JR sees as my ineluctable good fortune is that no matter how good the things that "happen" are, it's up to me to either take advantage of them, or f*** them up. No one's life is that easy, after all...!]
But...the amazing things, the incredible things, the - literally - unimaginable things that happen - are one reason I have such trouble with all that "The Secret" stuff, which has permeated pop culture for the past several years. Even if that works, or sort of works - the things that make my life seem magical to people like JR - and even to myself, sometimes, when I stop to really pay attention - are things I could never imagine ahead of time. They're better than anything I could imagine. One of the best things, of course, is the unimaginable surprises that seem, in retrospect ordained by...well, we'll get to that in a moment. So much better - and different - than I could conceive beforehand.
In the same way George Washington felt about many events in his life, I don't consider these amazing things that happen to me to be chance. He called the "thing" that he felt helped him "Providence".
Whatever it is, it's a lot smarter than Rhonda Byrne. Or me.
Speaking of which...
* * *
The other way I think I'm incomprehensibly fortunate is in creating things.
Take the song on this page, for example. Not to compare myself to Michelangelo (!), but...(Michelangelo said that when he sculpted he felt he was uncovering shapes that were inherent in pieces of marble, rather than creating an image from his own mind...) - That is exactly how these songs happen. Which, I feel, is exactly the same thing as running into amazing people, and generally having experiences that seem pre-ordained, and are without question better than anything I could have imagined, wished, or hoped for.
How could I, you see, imagine this song before I imagined it? It just happened. Like meeting my friends in the most startling places...
* * *
How can all this be useful to you?
I think, perhaps, if you do what George Washington did (I'm writing a somewhat serious book which includes these ideas - along with a lot more...(!) -) but, if you allow what he referred to as "Providence" to guide you, you might find - I don't know if it will work for you, it does for me, and did for George Washington - you might find that your life is as magical as other people think mine is, and as incredible as this song is, at least to me.
[By calling my song "incredible" I mean it is hard to fathom that I had anything to do with its creation - it just happened. Just as I don't feel it's me, but somehow Providence, that gives me the good fortune to, for example, meet the most amazing people on earth, even when they live on the other side of the earth....]
~
ps - get the book if you want to learn more about how GW became great - out next year some time - if you join the site, someone will let you know - gently, and unobtrusively - when it is out!
CU, Cheers...
(more~)
* I wrote it and recorded the piano and vocals then - the next day, I did the orchestra and all that stuff....
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Ralph Waldo Emerson:
this is from the 1800s, so try to get through the dated language to see the meaning...
When you shall say, 'As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season'; — then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history, and see that you hold your- self fast by the intellect. It is this domineering temper of the sensual world that creates the extreme need of the priests of science...
Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept another's dogmatism.
Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn. Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.
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