Set-list

It's been a month, so I should write. That's the thing about a discipline--sometimes you practice it when it must be done, not only at your leisure. We are busy creatures are we not? Even when we are not busy we are planning to be, hoping to be, desperate for importance. I know first hand. I am a list maker. At first, I didn't realize how this organizational tool would trip me up. I thought it was productive. I felt empowered when one of the crudely etched tasks on my post-it could be checked off. It was a sigh of relief--assurance that I was doing something. Lists have allowed me to manage time. Oh, wait there's the issue. When did I come to posses the power to manage time?

We all want control. Even when I don't write my lists down, my mind creates them. I am always chasing a product; finality. And here all along I said I loved the journey. My actions don't reflect that. My actions reflect someone who needs to listen, stop trying to "earn" everything (some graces can only be given), and discover there are no rules or success. There is only 'I lived everyday until I died', or 'I lied to myself and everyone else until the day I died'. I don't want to be caught lying.

In an effort to rediscover truth, I look at musicians. When an artist plays a show, most of them go out with a set-list. You know, the sloppy order of songs they sometimes follow. That rare bit of planning an artist forces themselves to do like the rest of the world. I believe some artist follow it. And I believe other's don't. I think for some it is a guideline, a safety when they play to a packed out theater in their hometown and they lose their breath looking around at all the support. Yet, when they start playing and the audience sings along--it lets them forget the list. That 8 x 11 holds no power. For a moment this scheduled tour and venues and clothes and albums and marketing-- it's all faded. This moment is not outlined by a list. It is too vast, too genuine and like every moment in life--unscripted. We can't have control because we don't have control. Like the musicians we must learn to go into our life, our concert with a set-list and expect that the moment will demand us to veer from what we know. In that we must realize the beauty, not the fear.

The things we must get done, are only a set-list. We must face them the same way an artist invites a musical moment into a concert. Think of how fearless and lovely those moments are. Would you not want the same for your own life?

"I am unwritten
Can't read my mind
I'm undefined
I'm just beginning
The pen's in my hand
Ending unplanned."
Unwritten, Natasha Bedingfield