The Real question that I’m grappling with: How, how do I use what I’ve learned over the years? How do I share my experience with others? How do I help someone else grow or make some kind of a difference in someone’s life?
At the end of life, people sometimes look back and wish they had made more time for the friendship. Work got busy, life got in the way, kids, other priorities, you know what I mean. You see, friendship takes effort. Sometime it begins with a simple phone call to stay in touch, and sometimes it means asking a friend how he’s doing, and listening and willing to give them a real answer.
I don’t have any answers either. I don’t have the right words to explain the pain of October 7, but there’s one thing I do have: music. And perhaps music is what I can offer tonight. Music to help us breathe, music to bring a little solace, music to remember, music to remind us of love, friendship, family, and life.
My mother was a powerhouse. She was a radio personality, a journalist, a mother, a wife, a businesswoman, and a person who somehow managed the entire family’s affair. She handled the household finance, she managed investment, if something needed to be organized, fixed, negotiated, or taken care of, my mother took care of it all.
We spend so much time trying to hold on to things that have already changed and moved on, whether it’s people, relationship, jobs, and even old versions of ourselves. And sometimes, the hardest part of change isn’t the change itself, it’s just letting go.
There’s another kind of forgiveness I think we often neglect and don’t talk about is forgiving yourself. And I’m going to talk more about it later on. And maybe that is the hardest forgiveness of all. We all have regrets.
So perhaps a new beginning isn’t about becoming somebody else. Maybe it is about giving ourselves permission to do something differently. That is where I think these cycles we create and give meaning to are useful.
What I think is remarkable about music: it reaches across families, generation, countries, culture, age, and of course languages.
our film may be 24 exposures, or sometimes 36. And if you were going on vacation, you had to think about it. How much film do I bring? Do I have enough? Do I want to waste a picture? Because once you took it, you can’t go back and erase it. You were done. Then came the big change. Five or six days of waiting for your photos to come back turned into 24 hours developing. And then came the one-hour photo. One hour, can you imagine? We thought that was incredible.
Because we all have Sirens: temptation. It could be alcohol. It might be drugs. It might be porn. It might be a relationship that you know is bad for you. It might be money, gambling, attention, power, or simply the feeling of constantly needing to be desired. The Siren is anything that sounds so good in the moment that makes you forget what you already know.