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As Individuals We Can Be As Elastic
By joseexist in Musings On Muses
March 25, 2010

As individuals we can be as elastic as we choose to be. The world will indeed do its best to stretch us as far as is mentally possible. The amount with which we give into the tugs and shoves of the world, are totally up to us. No matter how coercive the situation is, or how convincing the spiel, whatever our action(s) turns out to be, we are still enigmatic and individual.

Were you wild in your youth? Were you a placid, meek bystander? Did you jump off the bridge? Did you stand back and out of the way while the main crowd whipped themselves into their tribal frenzy? Whatever you did, and however you did it, was your true expression of your individuality. Many overt personalities would turn back to laugh at the meek as they sped away on their adventure. Many complacent and ignorant people barley even regarded those ‘below’ them with a passing glance. They too were on some enlightened path. Living fast and dying young, running wild, running free, and wisdom tried to say they would all end in the same disaster. The truth is that they all ended up in a myriad of ways. Some lived with or without scars, some died, but all had their own unique and individual endings. The only thing relative to all those adventures was the final page of the story. Whether it read “THE END”, or “TO BE COUNTINUED?”, or even “JUST THE BEGINNING”, the only thing the world could turn to was the ‘hardback’.

I’ve played the wild adventurer, and I’ve played the cautious timid. In either case I was myself and came thru still writing the chapters of my life. Chalk it up to luck or a higher sentience. The waters of wisdom rain down and we drink what we want while drowning in the deluge of what we really need. Life has a way of shaping us but the eventual temper of our mettle is a byproduct of our free will. We may not always have a broad spectrum of choices, but whatever choices confront us, we will ‘choose’.

The subject matter of a song comes from the ether like a ghost from the future. As new as the expression of that next song is, it is ripe with overtones of the past. Those mental harmonics are inescapable. Nostalgia will keep a new tune familiar but the choices of composition and the final arrangement can make it fresh and in some way exciting to any eventual listener. An artists’ box can be filled with all manner of ‘bells and whistles’ but those choices concerning what to use become the sole responsibility of said artist. Whether audacious and bombastic, or wispy and reserved, music and the emotions it can provoke are symptoms of an artists’ individuality and the general populations ‘choice’ to listen.

At some point in my life I faced a choice. Should I be an artist? Should I be a listener? I choose both and to this day have no regrets. Making music is a fun as listening to music for me. There are songs that drag my heart thru briar patches. There are songs that make me feel like a sole survivor of the human race. There are songs that give me hope as well as songs that desolate my soul. My mind has been filled with great conflagration at times, or drowned in the unfathomable depths of sadness, or any other powerful emotion for that matter. Music has done this to me and I made the choice to allow it to ‘muse’ me so. It has never mattered if the music was some one else’s, or my own.