I'm grateful for laughing and smiling. I'm grateful for seeing the beauty is in the zigs and the zags. I'm grateful for the pink-lit sky. I'm grateful for coffee. I'm grateful to be sober today.
Song of the Week:
I listen to the Beatles a lot. By, “ a lot,” I mean an awful lot. I began listening to them pretty seriously in high school, I can’t tell you how many times I listened to Abbey Road, and particularly the medley on side two. Of course, the subject has been broached here:
Despite my love for the Beatles, “Hey Jude,” just never grabbed me too much. Plus, it kind of annoyed me that everyone knew the words. If you really loved the Beatles, you’d be able to rattle off Side One of the White Album lickety-split. Or you can sing the “na na na nanana na” part of “Hey Jude.” So then I listened to this song at some last weekend and the song hit me in a different way. As I listened, a lot of things struck me, mostly, what a beautiful song of hope it is.
I’m going to digress to something that is not a beautiful song of hope and that is the Hughes Corporation’s “Don’t Rock the Boat (baby).” Why? I had a good friend in college who refused to believe that he was wrong about the words in the refrain. The actual song is “So, I’d like to know where, you got the notion.” Paul, a former resident of Menasha, firmly believed it was,
“So, I’d like to know where you got Kenosha?”
It was not possible to convince him that he was wrong on this, even when the complete absence of any other Wisconsin references in the song or in any work ever performed by the Hughes Corporation was pointed out to him. Or that the reference to Kenosha made even less sense when one considers the abundance of ocean-related lyrics.
Anyway, I was listening to “Hey Jude,” and I heard this line,
“The moment you need is on your shoulders.”
And then I went back and listened a few more times and suddenly just felt overwhelmed. Here’s the whole stanza (as I heard it):
So let it out and let it in, hey Jude, begin,
You're waiting for someone to perform with.
And don't you know that it's just you, hey Jude, you'll do,
The moment you need is on your shoulder.
When I took my trip back to DC earlier this week, the feeling I couldn’t shake was the loneliness and despair I felt during that decade of trying to stop drinking. I was empty and pretty much hopeless. When I listened to “Hey Jude,” last weekend, I was struck by how completely different my life is today. How life can change dramatically, how opportunities are suddenly presented. I know I’m at one of those spots right now; I know that my life stands where it is right now, because of where I’ve been. I can suddenly see how people, places and things arrived almost on cue to get me ready for this moment.
What is this moment? I don’t really know, but I have a sense that the world is changing fast and the companion sense that all I have to do is move forward. I see how some of the previous fortune-cookie like messages from the Big Guy (“Do the thing you don’t know how to do,” and “You hung on to you.”) even make some sense. I can see how things that hurt or disappointed me, or just left me sad and lost, were there to teach me exactly what I need for the next moment.
That last line really struck me, in part because Paul McCartney writes a lot about weight being on shoulders (see, e.g., “Carry That Weight.”), but this is different. In other usages, the shoulders bear the burden, you can sense they literally sag under the weight. This is different, this is the re-framed version of that,
the moment you need is on your shoulders.
I heard that and knew exactly what it meant. I felt it. That when the chance is finally here, it’s time to lean into it, leave the fear and pain and everything else that came before where it belongs and push hard. It’s not, “carry that weight,” it’s lift that weight. The moment I needed may be here, and it’s positioned where I can actually do something about it.
The actual words to the song are “the movement you need is on your shoulders.” It was intended to convey the sense that we are enough and we have enough inside ourselves to change. Those are lovely sentiments, but I still like my version better. The moment I needed may be here, on my shoulders, and I think it’s time to lift that weight.
Happy Friday