22 Days To Go: Jazz Lessons

This has been the most non-demanding time of my life. I have been on vacation for the past nearly four months. It’s time to teach myself a little lesson.

I need to stop.

I need to breathe.

I need to think about nothing.

I need to quit planning.

I need to just let it be.

I need to let go.

I need to empty all the contents out.

I need to close the door.

I need to live today’s day and tonight’s night.

I need to forget.

I need to forgive.

I need to love.

I need to live.

I need to just be.

I need to just go.

I need to just be free.

I need to not worry.

I need to be young.

I need to ignore time.

I need to let the days come to me as they come.

I need to listen.

I need to have patience.

I need to step away, step back.

I need to understand I’m not in control.

I need to stop trying to control everything.

I need to ignore practicality.

I need to dream more.

I need to create more.

I need to hum more often.

I need to smile more.

I need to laugh more.

I need to forget the seriousness of life.

I need to play more.

I need to give more.

I need to let myself go, be, do.

I need to rest.

I need to accept love.

I need to be kind.

I need to throw away fear.

I need to come home from the future.

I need to leave and learn from the past.

I need to start fresh, every day.

I need to live spontaneously.

I need to dance.

I need to kiss.

I need to hug.

I need to enjoy my life today.

These are not wants, these are needs. They are my needs, and I’m the only one that can provide them for myself. This list is a massage – to get all the knots and kinks out, the ones that have been sitting in my shoulders for too long. Too many years have passed while I was thinking about the next ones. Too many days have passed while I was thinking about their tomorrows.

Praying is hard for me. I get distracted by – gee, I wonder – too many thoughts in my head. I’m thinking about assignments I have due. I’m thinking about what’s going to happen to me in ten years. I’m thinking about when I should get my hair cut next. I’m thinking about what I can do to make myself focus on praying to God the next time.

I needed to pray today. I only pray when I’m desperate – when I have absolutely no idea what to do. That’s when I pray. I decided to take a shower, although it was completely unnecessary. I was perfectly clean. But nonetheless, I slid out of my clothes and made my way to the shower stall at the end of the hall. I turned the knobs to the right temperature and stood there letting the water pelt my skin.

I leaned my head against the tile wall and began. To pray.

When I need advice or consolation, God is a female. Sound and sure, gentle and kind. It’s comfortable. Like talking to my mom – but better. I don’t have to say anything out loud. I don’t even have to think anything. She just knows. She knows, and she loves.

I always start off like this:

God. I need you. I don’t know what you are or even if you do this kind of thing. But if you are listening and you are there and you are this kind of God, I need your help.

She’s slow to come at first. But when tears come, she comes running like a mama bear.

And I think I know she’s there.

She knows exactly what I’m talking about when I beg for her to tell me what to do. We jump right into conversation like she’s been in there, in the gallery of my mind studying the pieces, since my conception in April 1990.

She doesn’t say a word – there’s no holy voice coming from the heavens, or even from the shower head. She is quiet and patient. She is slow and soothing. She is listening. And loving. And that’s all. Tell me what to do. But she doesn’t. She tells me nothing. She just let’s me stand there, with my head against the tile, tears joining shower water on my face. Please, tell me what to do. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t even reassure me with a pat on the back, not even a half hug.

Why did you tell me what to do all those other times? Why did you save it then? I don’t want to give everything and it all be for nothing in the end. What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do? Silence meets me halfway. And so I join it. I turn the knobs. I grab my towel. I dry off. I go to my room. I shut the door. I get dressed. And then there’s a knock at my door.

Madison is early and unexpected. I let her in and busy myself with getting ready. I go eat an apple. I come fix my hair. We talk a little bit. And soon after, we make our way out.

The first clue.

Matt and Carmen join us and we walk to the café for jazz night.

It is here, that all the thoughts I have stashed away since the shower prayer come and lay themselves on the candlelit table. For me to look at. They get up, these thoughts, and dance in front of the stage to the soulful jazz. I watch them, mesmerized. Analyzing them as they spin. There’s me and him. There’s me and a dream. There’s the fights. There’s the kiss. There’s the way we fit. There’s love and fear, waltzing together. Fear and regret trade partners. I watch the way Present begs to be in the spotlight, but Future has already taken it. There’s everything I want in life, him included, holding out their hands to me – who’s will I take? They’re in my face, they’re in my ears.

Make the choice. Dum dum.

Make the choice. Dum dum, dum dum.

Make the choice. Make the choice. Dum dum, dum dum.

Or don’t. Just sit. Just listen to the music. Bah bah beedoo beedoo beedoo bum bah, yeahhhh.

And how fitting. Jazz. His favorite. Jazz is brilliant, he told me, because it’s completely made up as they go. You have to know music. You have to feel music. It’s unplanned, untamed. It’s free. It’s wild. It runs. It loves. It feels. It plays. It just goes. It just is. The music makes itself because the players trust the poetry – the blood that pumps through their veins. They trust it to just take them to better places. They trust it to just take them away – to just take them to where they’re meant to be. They put everything into it because their source is unlimited – they have everything to give every single time they pick up an instrument.

There is crazed and revolutionary beauty in the uncontrollable, unplanned, unrestricted beat of jazz music. There aren’t rules. There aren’t wrongs. There’s just freedom and passion and soul. There’s just music. And it works. It rhymes. It finds its way. It flows. It knows. It knows nothing. It goes for as long as it likes. It’s played note by note by note.

The second clue.

And so it must be with Life. Lived day by day by day. And trusting that it will make music on its own because you gave it everything and you infused passion into it and you loved it and you created it and you lived it like it was meant to be lived. It’s not calculation, it’s poetry. It’s not brain, it’s soul. It’s not confined, it’s free. It’s not controlled, it’s just created.

Because passion should never be planned.

The answer.