This first song is "I ain't the same" by Alabama Shakes, the second is "It's Time" by Imagine Dragons. I believe music speaks - and that both of these songs are saying something very different from each other, and yet, they are both - right.
How can that be?
A Story -
A couple of weeks ago I wanted to go to a writers group. I was rushing around, I put on pants with a button, wow, go me. Actually, I was pretty desperate to make this meeting.
What happens at this writers group is 5-8 people meet in a room at the library, bring several copies of a chapter or a short story that they have written, and read it aloud. Then the other people critic them. There are published novelists there. It is pretty serious stuff.
I was rushing around and could not for the life of me get my computer to make my printer print. It was maddening, I gave up and went to the library to print it. There were no computers available at the library, there was no way to hook up my computer to the library printer and it was going to cost me 25 cents a page to print (that is 3 pages times 8 people). I gave up. I went home. I pouted and got on with my evening.
I told myself something that I hadn't said in a long time "it just wasn't meant to be" which is dangerously close to "God didn't want me there." I couldn't get it out of my head. I kept telling people about it.
Then, last week they were having writers group again, I told Jonathon before he left for work that I was planning on going. I had used the printer earlier in the week for something else, unrelated, but hadn't printed the document that I was taking to share. I was determined to deal with that earlier in the day. A couple hours later I was sitting at the table with several of my children doing school work and the printer started printing. I am dead serious. I wasn't even near the computer. The first thing I did was look over at the computer, closed, on a table across the room.
It was printing the document that I wanted to take to writers group two weeks before.
I don't believe in stuff like this.
I don't believe in Karma or the universe or fate. I don't even believe that God works that way, anymore. I used to think that every little thing meant something. What I mean is, I don't really think that God gives a care whether I go to writers group or not. I don't think it is good to spend all my time analyzing every little thing that I do and the response that I get from it or what happens because of this or that thing (benign things, not something obviously right or wrong). It isn't healthy for me to ascribe a "God loves me for doing *this* and punishes me for doing *that* to everything that I do. I thought I was over that. This silly printer thing kinda rocked that paradigm for me a bit - okay - so maybe a lot.
In this way I feel like "I ain't the same anymore" but in another way, even time can't take some things from us, "I am just the same as I was, I am never changing who I am."
How this tension between *change* and *the same* works I don't know.
Why things happen or don't happen, why my printer wouldn't work and then worked with out being told to work. I really really don't know. I think it is an extreme example of my lack of control.
My need to accept -
This - just this. This moment and experience and situation.
And yet - move forward from it; learning, growing, changing - anything but staying still.
It is hard. The not understanding.
And still -
Figuring out how to simply live this mysterious, crazy, complicated, confusing, amazing, blessed life that I live.
