One is in the Future, The Other is Right Now
On becoming something.
It’s my 43rd Birthday tomorrow.
You know, it seems like a very supportive thing to tell another person that they can be anything. And my goodness does it seem saccharine and trite to tell someone that they are someone special just the way they are. Borderline patronizing. But I think, even from a very young age, the latter really is more true than the former.
What’s better - to chase the next anything you might be about to become or to allow yourself to unfold into who you already are?
Kids really drive this point home - what’s better, telling your daughter she can become anything - an artist, a doctor, a mom, a lawyer, and sending them into a confusing house of mirrors wondering “am I becoming this or that kind of anything”….or telling her she’s doing great exactly as she is and to keep working at simply becoming even more herself, to make each decision from a place of being tapped in to who she is?
One is in the future, the other is right now.
Our daughter Ruth invented out of thin air the concept of saying “you’re special to me” as a way of saying “I love you” - it was the most incredible, genuine thing I’d ever heard a person say. She was just cuddling up and put those words together and offered them to us in the most pure expression of connection I had ever heard. We all still say it to each other.
I’m working on a new record with my friend Rich Jacques. It’s songs about parenthood and childhood, both serious and light hearted. Written alone, written with friends, written over many years, comprised of many ideas that have been mined from recordings peppered with bathtub splashing noises in the background, crying babies, the clank of dishes.
To warm up (and to finance the record), Rich and I are recording some private client songs. A person very close to me has been writing songs for years and hired me to sing them for him. At first I tried to make them into something else, to make them anything other than what they were - rewrite some lyrics, change a chord and “improve” them. I did stumble on some accidentally great stuff doing that, but I could tell the client wasn’t totally thrilled.
So this time, in Rich’s kitchen over the last week, I have just…sang and played them as they are, without any effort to change them, but instead trying to connect deeply to their essential nature.
What’s better? Telling someone their song is not done and needs to become something else or singing it exactly as it is?
One is in the future, one is right now.
-Syd