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Things Can Still Change

It’s finally fall in Central Texas. Months of relentless heat have finally begun to lift. There’s a palpable lightness to the atmosphere, to people’s demeanors, to the world around us. Things have finally begun to change.

I’ve spent most of my life in the Central and Southern parts of Texas. The summers are hot and unrelenting. The heat and humidity just seem to draw on forever and ever, with no end in sight. You just grow to accept, even if not fully like, that this is just how life is. You get used to being sweaty and uncomfortable, you get used to your ballooning electric bill. You adapt.

What else can you do?

This past week the heaviness of the heat has finally begun to shift. Fall is easily my favorite season of the year. I’ve always loved the time of year: the change in rhythms, the change in weather, the upcoming holidays, the rituals of the season. When we look at the natural world, we can see the rhythm of the world in the plants and environment around us. Spring begins the process of growth and new birth, and things really kick in during the summer time, where so much growth happens. And then the fall begins and things begin to slow down, and head toward the rest and repose of winter.

The thing that struck me the most with the recent weather change is how deeply and profoundly I was reminded that things can still change, and do change, and will change. Fall tells me, on some deep primal level, that change is still possible.

I think most of us sometimes feel disturbed by the world around us right now. We’re inundated with large and loud opinions, scandals, crises; fear and unknowing loom large. For me, sometimes it can feel overwhelming, like things will never change.

Sometimes in life the only thing we can do is draw down deep, adapt, and just carry on, because you have absolutely no other choice. You summon up as much courage as you can muster, and you keep trudging through.

You drop the expectations that things will be any different.

You drop the attachments to the things you feel entitled to.

You surrender.

But then…something shifts.

The heaviness begins to lift.

The weather begins to lighten.

The leaves become different colors.

The rhythm changes.

Change has begun.

Fall is a reminder to me to keep showing up.

To keep digging deeper.

To keep loving harder.

Change will come.

We’re Growing A Forest of Redwoods

Lately I’ve been wrestling with a low level feeling of despair.

It’s not the kind of crippling depression where you can’t get anything done; it’s more of a low-level background hum that never quite goes away, like a cough that you just can’t seem to shake. I think it comes from toiling day after day and feeling like nothing is growing.

A few weeks back I was in this same place, feeling like the things I’m spending my precious time and my energy on aren’t going anywhere, aren’t turning into the things I hope they will. And that’s kind of discouraging. Sometimes we have such huge dreams and sometimes it feels like the whole thing is just never going to get off the ground.

If you don’t know a lot about us or the things we dream of, we’re dreaming of really big, beautiful things. Way more than just music. We love making music, but the things that we have in our hearts are way to big to be contained in just one art form. We dream of a thriving collective of people sharing art, of a thriving community, where everyone is welcomed and respected and contributes. A community where we can take off the masks and be real and honest, and maybe in the process heal and not feel so alone. It’s so big. And it grows so slowly.

I realized a few weeks ago what the root of this despair is, and I wanted to write something about it to remind myself when its familiar chorus gets stuck in my head. The thing about all this that we’re working on is that it’s so big that it just moves slowly. Glacially slow. All the best things in life though grow really slowly. Nature is replete with examples of exponential growth, where it looks like absolutely nothing is going on and then out of nowhere there is an explosion of life and growth.

Maybe you can relate. A creative project that just seems like it’s going nowhere. A business you’re trying to grow. Fitness goals that you’re trying to reach. Kids you’re trying to raise. You toil from sun up to sun down and it looks like the needle hasn’t budged at all. And that’s really discouraging. What are we putting in all this effort for if we’re not making progress?

I think our problem here is that our timeline is just too short. One of my favorite quotes is “most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year.” I feel the weight of that constantly. Slowly but patiently investing in something pays off so largely in the long run, but we’re so worried about making progress today that we get discouraged and want to quit. Compound interest doesn’t just apply to retirement accounts.

The last few days have been an absolute struggle to just keep going. Between trying to get two businesses to grow, to grow our music and our audience, working on a full length album, keeping up with our personal health and family health, it’s exhausting. Some days just feel like too much.

Sometimes I look around and see everyone around me with fancier cars than I have, nicer looking clothes and gadgets, have their shit together, have already paid their taxes and have all their laundry put away and dishes cleaned, while I sit on my little pile of dirt, covered in mud, and look at the patch of land that hasn’t done a damn thing all week. Often it feels like the people around me are in need of food and all I can do is sit there and point at the sprouts that have only just now broken through the ground.

I need to zoom out my timeline. I’m looking too closely.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to grow a forest of redwoods; these massive, magnificent, sturdy trees that exist for hundreds and hundreds of years. And I’m reminded that things of that magnitude and longevity don’t grow overnight. Weeds grow overnight. And then they die. They’re so transient. These massive giants take decades to make any real progress. But we’re not in the business of growing weeds. We want to grow redwoods, things that will last and withstand the test of time. And that means that from day to day, despite weathering the lightning and hail, the cold and the wind, it doesn’t look like much is happening. But the next year it’s a little bigger. The next decade it’s noticeably sturdier. The next century it’s massive and nearly indestructible. We don’t want to grow weeds. When we’re dealing with such massive things, any daily, monthly or even yearly progress is really hard to measure. Keep showing up. Keep pressing on. Keep toiling. Fortunes aren’t built overnight. Vibrant, thriving communities aren’t built overnight. There’s no such thing as an “overnight sensation”. There is only steady, consistent pressing in, until somewhere, out of nowhere, growth and new life burst forth seemingly out of nowhere.

Imagine if we were actually growing a forest of redwoods, these massive, gigantic trees. We would toil day in and day out, and wouldn’t really see any changes in the course of our days, or months, or maybe even years. But our children would. Their children would. The choices we make, the courses we take today, don’t only impact our lives. They impact our kids and their friends, and their kids even further down the road.

Keep showing up. Keep pressing on. Keep toiling.

Toiling with you,

Drew

Cookies & Gun Violence

 

Like so many of us, I’ve been thinking a lot about the shooting that occurred just a few days ago. Once again we all find ourselves in a numb confusion. Like a pack of circling vultures, the familiar rhythms of questions we know all too well begin again: why did this happen again? What could we have done to prevent this? What do we do now? Thoughts and prayers flow again alongside louder calls for gun reform.

Let me start by pointing out a painfully obvious thing, but one that I think gets lost in the heat of our confusion: no one wants their loved ones to die like this. No matter if you’re Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, Christian, Muslim, Jew, or atheist, I hope we can all agree on that. No one, regardless of their beliefs, deserves to die like that. I know this almost seems frivolous, but I feel it’s important to point out that at the root of all of this: we don’t want fundamentally different things here.

More and more these days, it feels to me like our public conversations could be summed up by the words of Macbeth: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It feels like we’ve reached a stalemate, and no one wants to admit that, so we just keep furiously debating but not moving the needle forward because we have to do something in the face of such horrors. Legislation doesn’t move forward, attitudes become more entrenched, and we just make a loud ruckus while just wait for the next one. Maybe we’re arguing about the wrong things. To paraphrase Tony Robbins, if you want a better answer, ask a better question. Maybe we’re not making progress because we’re asking the wrong questions.

Maybe the questions we might be better asking have nothing to do with guns. Perhaps the questions should be a bit deeper, a bit more nuanced. Perhaps the question isn’t what to do about guns (though I think we should also talk about things like why America collectively owns almost half of the worlds guns). Maybe we should spend less time debating from our partisan camps what to do about guns and start having more conversations about how we feel so alone, so isolated, so disconnected. Maybe we should start talking with each other about our pains, our fears, the things that hurt us. Here’s something else I think we could all agree on: healthy people don’t commit mass murder. Healthy, integrated people generally do less shitty things. Maybe the gun violence we see is an indicator of our health as a society.

We have an anger problem.

Anger isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Anger is a close kin to fear, and both have served us well as a species. Without fear alerting us to potential dangers and the quickening and clarifying powers of anger, we likely would have never moved our way from the bottom of the food chain. Anger and fear are powerful tools; but like the guns we wield, so often we’re not taught well to respect and handle the immensely powerful tools we hold. Anger and fear are powerful but blunt force tools. Imagine trying to perform a delicate brain surgery with a sledge hammer.

I feel like as a society we really suck at unpleasant emotions. We want things to be pleasant, easy, polite. We suck even more at connection.

As I dig deeper into some of these questions, I start to touch on things I’ve been ruminating on lately, things that I’m uncomfortable with and wish weren’t so. For all our beauties, we are a violent species. I don’t think there’s much debate there. Our history is littered with stories and examples of just how violent and cruel we can be to our fellow humans. I think most of us don’t want to admit to this, but within each of us is the capability of violent and horrible things. We hope it never comes to that, but dig deep enough, think about it deeply enough, and we realize that each of us carries the capacity for great violence. Of course it’s not an inevitability, and each of us is tasked in this life with learning to contend with it, but we do disservice to ourselves by denying it.

Anger that isn’t dealt with festers and grows. In an ideal situation, anger would arise, one acts accordingly and appropriately, the anger subsides, and one moves on. If you’re like me (and I suspect a lot of people in our country), anger arises, one suppresses it because of cultural baggage, one moves on thinking it’s no big deal, one yells at the person in front of them at the traffic light for not paying attention and making one miss the light. Our anger gets so misplaced because we haven’t been trained (or maybe given permission) to express it appropriately in the moment it arises. We’ve instead been taught that “nice people don’t get angry”, and since nice people don’t get angry, and we want to be nice people, we stuff that shit down and end up kicking the dog weeks later.

We don’t do anger well in America. We don’t do uncomfortable emotions well in America. This is why we need great art, great movies, great music, with courageous creators willing to face the uncomfortable questions. It can feel incredible frivolous to make art when people were just gunned down in a public space, but it’s the call of the artists in our society to give us permission and space to feel the things we’re not supposed to or able to, to explore the contours of the dark, to give us a chance to collectively grieve, to feel angry.

I grew up in the suburbs. You don’t do anger in the suburbs. Everything is nice and well kept, lawns are mowed, HOA’s ensure our property values don’t decline, we smile at the neighbors we rarely talk to (let alone know the names of), and everyone locks themselves into their safe, isolated enclaves every night. We might venture next door if we need some sugar or an egg, but for the most part everyone stays isolated. I’ll be honest, I’m uncomfortable with anger and violence. Maybe everyone is…I can only speak from my experience. But part of my discomfort with it is my lack of exposure to it and knowing how to properly handle it. Just like a gun, anger is a tool that needs to be treated with a great deal of respect and care, and one needs to be trained in how to handle it.

Yesterday, the day after this latest shooting occurred, we were navigating all the normal things like making cookies for one of our kids’ birthdays, sacrificing time from an overburdened schedule for PTA meetings, and trying to field all of the responsibilities that come with owning pets and businesses and just generally being a human being. It felt so frivolous to do those simple, everyday things when such a tragedy had occurred. But I was also reminded of how counter-intuitive reality often is. If these events are just further evidence of the fabric of our society pulling apart at the seams, then perhaps the very best thing each of us can do RIGHT NOW is to invest in our communities to make them the kinds of places that are less and less likely for these kinds of tragedies to happen. Maybe we can work to creating a society that feels less compelled to need so many guns. Every community needs to take responsibility for itself and its residents. Each of us needs to take responsibility for our neighbors. If the fabric of society is ripping at the seams, it falls on us to mend it.

Emotional intelligence, empathy, vulnerability, connection: these are the things when practiced in greater depth by all of us that could lessen the occurrence of these horrible events.

What actions do each of us need to take, what responsibilities to each other do we need to take more seriously to create the kind of society that makes these tragedies less likely? It falls to us, and it is possible.

What kind of questions should we be asking? How about “what kind of cookies do you like?”

-drew