Monday, October 15, 2012

We Need The Things We Love

We need the things we love.

I was thinking about this as I watched football yesterday.
My earliest football memory is at age ten. Watching Jim Brown bring cool to the field. To this day the Browns very basic helmet strikes a chord with my soul.
I have been loving football for 48 years.
I watched THE PATS yesterday, a chunk of the Cowboys game, switched back and forth to the Niners and caught pieces of the Packers.
I don't watch football passively. It is an intense experience to me. I am not talking about screaming, I am talking about the emotions the game stirs in me.
I appreciate the game, I love it, I understand it, it connects with something in me that I probably can't name and maybe am not even aware of.
I can tell you I love the combination of violence and grace, the precision and the insanity, and all of that is true but none of that communicates what I feel when I sit in front of the TV. Because it is a personal thing, a meaningful thing, an experience that communicates with and comes from the soul, from my essence.
I sat silently watching football yesterday because I am dead right now, stranded on an island of nothingness. But inside I was feeling intensity. Inside I could actually feel myself smiling.

This morning I started reading Gregg Allman's autobiography. The Allman Brothers Band has been a force in my life since I was fifteen. I have been loving The Allman Brothers band for forty three years. I feel no less passionate about them now then I did in 1969.
I have read everything there is to read about the band and from band members. I have seen them in concert easily over thirty times. I have seen Gregg solo a number of times. I have listened to their music a million times.
And yet I sat there with this book reverently. I was excited to dig in. I am reading it with fierce focus. I stared at the jacket cover for a minute, I felt the book in my hands, I opened it up with anticipation.
I read constantly. Can't get enough. I love to read. But when I pick up a book like this it is a whole different thing. It feels different, it moves me, brings me alive, makes me happy. It is a personal thing, a meaningful thing, an experience that communicates with and comes from the soul, from my essence.

I have read many biographies and autobiographies. All walks of life, all kinds of people. They are people who interest and inspire me. More importantly they are people who LIVE their lives.
I have the feeling I have been only scratching the surface of my own life for around forty years.
I want to dig in, I want to dive beneath the surface, but the surface is beginning to freeze.
This disturbs me.
I think in part I read these life stories in the hope that they will connect with me on a soul-deep level and super charge me to get up and go. To move and shake and do and uncover my essence and discover my purpose.
I am partial to rock 'n roll biographies and autobiographies because that love occupies a huge chunk of my soul.
Two of the tastiest were of Neil Young and Willie Nelson, and they weren't even autobiographies. However Neil just came out with his autobiography and I cannot wait to devour it.
Pete Townshend just came out with an autobiography, and that is another one I cannot wait to sink my teeth into. He is an outspoken guy who has lived a large life. I guarantee that story will not bore.

We need the things we love.
I feel sorry for people who have no passion, no interests. How the hell do they get through life? Why do they keep trying? Intellectually I would think it impossible to have no passionate interests, but I come into contact with it it all the time in vacant eyes and mindless, petty conversation, and stooped shoulders and the smell of defeat. The stench of surrender.

Football resurrected emotion in me yesterday. Gregg Allman's autobiography did the same this morning.
I am happy to indulge in these passions, proud to be fiercely committed.
These things keep me alive. They allow me to escape and they inspire me to hope and to fight.

Souls need passion to survive. There is nothing sadder than a dead soul in a living body.

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