Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”
-Steven Pressfield, War on Art
The sun is rising in the distance, draping the horizon in a spectacle of colors that look a bit like the yoke of a yard egg cracked over a blanket of neon mauve. Glorious. Though also a bit blinding when it greets me head on after exiting Ruth’s school. I reach into the passenger seat beside me, rummaging through a stack of books, papers, and other odds and ends, until my fingers land on the smooth finish of some sunglasses at the bottom of the pile. I grab them and slide them on right as one of my favorite songs comes on the radio.
For a minute, this fortyish- year-old can feel the old familiar contours of her twenty-year-old self. In the smile that has crept onto my face at the sound of music I love, down into the creases that form along the sides of my eyes whenever I laugh. In my hand, as I reach to turn the volume up. In my voice, as I sing at the tip-top of my lungs.
I have always loved a good song, played and sung loud on a sunny day.
If I’m being honest, the song itself doesn’t really sound like it would be one of my favorite songs. As Ruth would say, the guy is a little “yelly,” and I have a unique capacity to check out when tones rise towards yellishness. When that happens all the words just kind of blend into a sound that’s a lot like the adults in Charlie Brown, unintelligible and doesn’t make for good music.
But in this case, I listened through the gruffness. I guess because I like the artist, Luke Combs. Not that I’ve met him personally or know him in any actual real way, I just know an older couple who spent an evening with him at the Flora-bama, engaged in deep, thoughtful conversation without knowing who he was until he had left, paid their tab on his way out, and then the bartender filled them in on his identity.
If you’ve ever been to the Flora-bama, then you know that in the evening hours it’s not exactly a hotbed for deep conversation. In fact, one could say that it’s somewhat designed to oppose those things and is sometimes filled with patrons who are eager to aid in this opposition. It can be a microcosm of excess with a side of debauchery. Picture Bourbon Street meeting the Gulf Coast.
But instead of getting into that scene, where he would have no doubt been received with open arms and had his ego fluffed in all the ways egos like fluffing, Luke Combs chose to pull up a seat at a table and be human with other humans. And because of that, I like him. It makes me trust his music and the photos of him on Instagram, if that makes any sense.
And its also why I listened to the song, which was a story about someone asking him in an interview,
“What would you be doing, if you weren’t doing this?”
Meaning, if there was no crowd, no money, no fame, no record deals, no stadium tour, what would you do instead?
His response was, “I would be doing this.” And then, through each line, he explains that he has and will always be an entertainer, regardless of where he happens to be entertaining or who the entertainment is for. He can’t help but entertain. Whether he is barely getting by or being paid lavishly. Whether he is accepted or still trying to prove his worth. Whether he is entertaining a packed stadium or an old barroom filled with a few good friends. He just has to do it. It’s as if the “why” behind his doing this, isn’t a destination upon which he hopes to arrive, or some external thing he has to strive after, gain, or achieve, but is instead something that is already in him.
The “why” belongs to him. It’s already his.
His doing flows out of his being.
Which is, I believe, where all good work has to begin. It’s the essence of wholeness, which leads to abundance. The opposite of which would be fragmentation that leads to scarcity and diminishment.
My favorite part of the song is when his voice softens, as if he is settling into himself with genuine affection, and he sings,
“I guess I’m saying it’s always been about….” After which he just repeats what he’s been saying the whole song, entertaining.
Its beautiful.
And I wonder, how would we finish that line for ourselves?
I guess I’m saying it’s always been about….
This is not always an easy thing to unearth from inside of ourselves, much less to claim through our actual living, allowing our doing to flow from our being.
Part of the trouble is that we are programmed to come at the question of what our lives are about, what we are about, backwards. To choose an external destination that promises to provide security and a sense of identity and then go after it. Consider the old-familiar question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” That subtly implies that our being is defined by an career choice that is somewhere out there. Which can leave us thinking that life isn’t a journey of discovering our true selves and becoming that, but is instead about the making of ourselves along some self-directed, self-propelled trajectory towards a title, role, profession, salary or identity that is off in the distance. And then we go after that, sometimes with everything we’ve got. Thinking that the hunger within ourselves, our search for purpose, meaning, value, and comfort will be satisfied once we build that career, receive that title, gain that position, put on that uniform, wear that name, fill that role. When really, what we are after is already within each one of ourselves. We just don’t know it or we lost it or we are too distracted to figure it out. And sometimes it actually gets buried underneath all those words and titles and nameplates and clothes we’ve put on while trying to build a life for ourselves out in the world.
And so, whenever I listen to this song it just feels like an invitation to look back on myself over the years with a similar sort of affection. And to image how my memories merge into their own unique response to that line,
“I guess I’m saying it’s always been about…”
I see a little me, outside, planting pinecones in a sandbox, hoping a tree will grow.
I see little me hunched over scraps of paper and can still access that sense of wonder that flooded my imagination as soon as I learned how to form a sentence. And how that set off this slow realization that putting words together is like painting a work of art or building a beautiful garden. I see little me, so convinced that letters and words and paragraphs were powerful. And that I was powerful when I used them. Especially when those words pointed people to God’s love.
I see me growing up writing stories and songs, making books, sending cards, and writing Scripture down to share with friends.
Then I see teenaged me. Struggling in a town where excellence seemed like a prerequisite for residency and everyone appeared so well aimed, so ready to be propelled in the world in pursuit of the careers they had claimed with such assurance back in grade school. The doctors. The lawyers. The president. And I see me believing in them. I saw them landing before they had even taken off. I just couldn’t see the same in myself. As my confidence in those around me rose, the assurance I had in my own words, waned. And in its place came this rising sense of certainty that not everyone should speak. Not the feeble. Not the shaky. Not those who were perhaps only built for silence and shadows instead.
Then I see me in college. Tucked away in the solitude of a massive library in downtown Boston. The city churning away just beyond the window, while I sat hunched over notebooks, writing songs and term papers at a ravenous pace. I see notebooks filled to the brim, hidden away for safe keeping. And I see all of my little apartments, filled with plants in tiny pots in bathroom windows and fire escapes. For no reason, other than because I had to. I was broke. But somehow never too broke for a bag of soil and a new plant.
I see me married, in my twenties, on the other side of the country, working at an engineering firm, spending all my money building gardens and farms wherever we lived, and spending every spare minute in my cubicle writing a blog about it, “observations from life on the farm.” Louisiana felt so foreign and unfamiliar, and I felt displaced in it, but when I dug into the soil, I came home. But none of it made sense. Not in any practical way. Nothing like my career which was certain. There, I was rewarded with consistent promotions, increased responsibility, tangible feedback and raises, all of which assured me that my work was good and that I was valued. So the blog faded away, for practicalities sake. But the farm stayed.
I see me struggling with infertility. Asking questions in my writing that I had never asked before. Like this one that I jotted down over and over again in my journals, “what if the stories of our struggles to trust can be told in a way that is like a finger pointing to God?” But those questions left me feeling too exposed, and I still doubted that I knew anything about trust or pointing.
Then I see me as a mother in my thirties. Devastated by the flood. Traumatized. Grieving. Lost. And I see me picking up a pen with shaking hands, because I had to. Fear had paralyzed me from the inside out. And God used writing to teach me how to move again... and in that I remembered. Words are powerful, and I am not weak or defenseless. I see me scribbling my way through death and resurrection, and then being sent out with that little book in hand. Because stories that point to the love of God speak healing and hope into a darkened world.
Now I see me in my forties. With all of me in tow. The highs and the lows. The joy and the grief. The strengths and the weaknesses. Sitting before a computer that is literally wearing out from me tapping away at it for so long. Still surrounded by pages of manuscripts. Still writing my observations from life on a farm. Still shooting out Scripture to you all, my friends. Still aware of how unpractical it is. But still so in love with these gardens of sentences and paragraphs that I get to tend. Still so in awe of the power of words on a page. Still hoping that everything I say, points as clearly as I am able today, to the love that awaits all in the Kingdom of God.
So here I am, doing this because I have to. Because to not do it would be the only kind of death I know that I cannot, should not, sustain. Doing this because this is the “why” that is inside of me. Its mine. It’s been mine ever since I was formed in my mother’s womb. It was written into the fabric of my soul. And like Jacob I left the certainty and security of the life I had built for myself behind, a couple of times, and have gone into the wilderness to wrestle with God over it. And here I am now, with a limp, but also a name. I am a gardener. Which is a name that applies in parenting, people, paragraphs, as well as in plots.
And a name is something we live out of, not up to.
What about you?
What has it always been about for you? And what would you be doing? If you weren’t doing this?
“I set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Therefore, choose life.” (Deuteronomy 30:19) Why, I wondered, would God waste precious breath on saying something so obvious? I had failed to understand the perverse comfort we sometimes get from choosing death in life, exempting ourselves from the challenge of using our gifts, of living our lives in authentic relationship with others.”
- Parker Palmer
I really connected with your story and your why - I don’t know what, or exactly which stories, or how they’re gonna be received, but writing has always been my why. And I’m still learning how to trust God with it and what he’s going to do with those words. But I know it’s all I can do to keep writing and keep sharing, letting him be the center of it.