Listening to this song brings me back in time. To the time when I first picked up a guitar and played until my fingers bled. Literally.
Right before I picked up the guitar I played piano. Mrs. Tower was my music teacher and then became my private tutor. It was also the piano teacher for my first crush, Puppy love. We’re still friends to this day and we can laugh now about the heartbreak we left each other with. Her, living such an incredibly different life than I, and I still living my Rock Star dream. We only reconnected after years thanks to Facebook. The world has gotten so much smaller. We (and I mean us 60’s and 70’s children) couldn’t have even imagined the ‘internet’ or ‘celphones’. Impossible dreams. Yet! We had Star Trek, and the writings of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. That was our internet. If I wanted to contact that first love back in the day, I couldn’t just pick up my cel and send her a text, or an email, or Facebook for that matter. I had to wait. I had to ponder what she was up to so when I did get to talk to her it was HOURS spent on the phone, with my Mom impatiently asking me how much longer I was going to be on the phone.
I’m not here to talk about her, though. I’m here to talk about patience.
Patience… something we’ve all lost. We are now a society that wants everything now. And if we can’t get it in 2 seconds or less we are switching providers. I’m not pulling a crotchety old man speech out of my back pocket. Believe me, I’m part of this society. I understand the impatience at times. I was fortunate to grow up in the era that I did. I had no choice but the wait for things, like the telephone that I mentioned in the last paragraph. Patience was going to record stores and looking through thousands of albums to find the one that spoke to you. And still it was no guarantee of it being your saving grace. Like the first time I bought an ELP album. I’ll admit… it was not an easy listen, at first. Not all of the songs were; ‘Still… You turn me on’, ‘Lucky Man’, or ‘From the Beginning’. But to get these gems I would listen and wait. Knowing that they were eventually coming up. And in waiting I grew to appreciate the rest of the music. The depth of those three instruments (four if you count Greg Lake switching from Bass to Guitar and vise versa), it was incredible to me. Imagine doing that now? I can’t even listen to 10 seconds of a song on Amazon without losing my patience. Ok… that’s an exaggeration… I’m not like that. But I bet you know someone that is! We also didn’t have the distractions that we have today. I could sit there with an album cover and stare at it while listening to the music. Nothing else existed. I perfected the art of album cover staring, learning ever inch of it. The more interesting the cover the better. I remember getting Elton John’s ‘Capt. Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy’. I would find new images on that album cover every time I looked at it. It fascinated me. It was a kind of meditation you could say. Sitting silently, alone, with the music.
Sit silent, alone, with the music.
It will do you some good. It will do this world good. I challenge you to only look at Facebook a couple times a day to start. See if you start going through withdrawals. You might. 🙂 Of course I’m being selfish here. I want you to sit with MY music for hours and I want you to open your eyes and create the world that you really want. No need to see what everyone else is up to. Forget about them for a bit and concentrate on you. You don’t have to listen to Emerson, Lake & Palmer. 🙂 Pick what you want, but pick something that will allow you to wander around those dark chasms of your brain that you haven’t explored in a LONG time.
Like I said, I don’t know if I’d want to grow up in these times. I’m sure the generation before me says the same thing about my generation and so on, and so on, ad infinitum. There is so much going on outside of ourselves now that we don’t have time to stop and think even if we wanted to. People pay to stop thinking now. One of my good friends owns a Yoga studio. Ask her, she’ll tell you. She can get your brain to shut off for awhile.
Peace,
D
“From the Beginning”
