I don't remember where or when this happened but it happened just the same. We were out one night when I was in my late teens. Just sitting in a car somewhere possibly having a drink or smoke and listening to some rock music on WABO that played late nights. I don't remember what was on but like records tend to do after much use this song had a skip in it. Well, it played over and over and over to the point where we couldn't even hear it for our laughter and figured the DJ must have been out in the parking lot himself. It was many minutes before it got straightened up but we laughed about it for weeks wondering just what happened.
Life is made up of rhythms. Most of the time they follow normal paths. You have the disjointed rhythm of the young where they have to follow the desires of the body in eat, sleep, and poop. The pre and teen years where they follow the latest and shiniest like birds wheeling and dashing across the sky in movements that only their subconscious can understand. Young adults are starting to bring things together where they can actually feel the rhythm in what they have chosen to follow. And then adulthood where we supposedly have it together, the rhythm is there any time we choose to access it, moving with the beat that we have chosen from fast to slow. I know this sounds kind of simplified but bear with me.
I have told you of my love for this small town and the community around it. When I was young and in school it was so small as to be stifling. It pressed about me and made me think that getting away was for the best so that I wouldn't explode. The struggle to do the things that called out to me was endless even to the smallest. So I floundered about not feeling like I belonged anywhere I was, sometimes even in my own body. In trying things that I thought were part of my rhythm or to help me find it I was like the thousands of others who experimented with drugs and alcohol. Right or wrong it was part of that fascination of things that made me feel better.
I can't tell you what it feels like to be high if you never have been, the same way I can't tell you what it feels like to work past that place where you want to stop but can't and you get into a zone of where you have no feeling. Your body working like an automaton doing what it has been trained to do. I totally understand the fascination of taking your mind somewhere else to leave the real behind. As an adult, I have learned the real reasons behind all this but it doesn't make it any less fascinating. So many of us have that bent toward destruction that we sometimes never learn to control it or use the power that God gives to get it out of us. Others who haven't had your struggle think that it’s easy because they can. You hear your music, they hear theirs.
Life, true life, is hearing your beat even when everything else about you is clamoring for your attention. I believe that God instills and allows us to learn right or wrong in our own pace. It's not what He wants because it destroys those who never learn, but He allows it nevertheless. It has been said of hearing music that there are those who hear and dance to the beat, and those who dance to the words. I love the rhythm that my life has and can get cranky when forced out of the grooves, like a record that has a skip, and sometimes I have to pick up the needle and place it back where it was. Everyone's is different and being able to hear it and follow, even if it's just sometimes, is what allows us all to live together. Until next week. ags
