I am not accustomed to vehemently disagreeing with you when I listen to your podcast Dear Hank and John, but in episode 140: The Spoon in the Road you were shockingly wrong. Desperado is a great song. Do you ever have the experience of hearing lyrics that are so true and so poetic that they fit into your heart like a puzzle piece? There are words like that in Desperado. It's part of a duo of songs that describe depression to my heart in a way that is both frighteningly accurate and somehow comforting.
Unfortunately, I can't quote them here because you can't quote song lyrics on blogs without permission. But you can listen here--from 1:57 to 2:28.
That's truly magical stuff right there, and I can't believe you don't appreciate it. Now you said something about listening to the Eagles through your whole childhood, and I didn't discover them until my 20s. So I would think maybe that was why, except the next song in my duo of Magical Descriptions of Depression songs is one I've known as long as I can remember. It's by John Denver. Listen from the beginning until 0:35.
I listen to that song sometimes and wonder how someone who never met me could understand me better than anyone who has ever known me.
Even though I've known Rhymes and Reasons since I was a baby, I didn't discover its mystically powerful words until I was older, and so I wonder if the same thing might happen to you with Desperado if you listen to it with your grown-up ears. :)
As long as we're talking Eagle's lyrics, can we just talk about this incredible description of addiction? Less hopeful than the other two, but still powerful. Start at 3:35 and go to 4:20.
A few years ago, my high school aged son walked into the room, sat down at the table across from me, looked deep into my eyes and proclamed:
I have rassled with an alligator
I done tussled with a whale
I done handcuffed lightning
Thrown thunder in jail.
That's bad.
Only last week, I murdered a rock
Injured a stone; hospitalized a brick.
I'm so mean I make medicine sick.
Last night I cut the light off in my bedroom
Hit the switch--was in the bed before the room was dark.
Fast!
(by: Muhammed Ali)
That was my first exposure to the words of Mohammed Ali. I knew who he was, of course, but not much about him. For the next few years, I thought I was getting to know him, but really I was just reading more of what they called his "trash talking." He was an insanely good trash talker, and much of it was what we might today call self-affirmations. He died on June 3, 2016, and I mourned with his other admirers. But there was so much more to him than I knew.
On episode 166: Watch Old Video Clips from the Happier With Gretchen Rubin podcast, she challenged her listeners to find someone from the past that they are interested in learning more about and watch old video clips of them. She and her sister Elizabeth suggested that this might be more interesting than just reading about them, because the video clips were like time capsules, capturing them and their surroundings in a way you wouldn't otherwise see. They were right! This was like a time capsule of prejudice and the civil rights movement.
Muhammed Ali wasn't just the first person I thought of when they suggested doing this. He was the only person. I tried to think of other people, but as soon as I thought of a name, Muhammed Ali would box them right out of my brain.
What I learned:
Muhammed Ali was funny. He was smart and passionate and he lived his life with honor and dignity. He wasn't just a proponent of black rights, he was a champion of it. His words were empowering to me, a middle-aged white woman, but as I watched his video clips, I realized something I hadn't fully considered before: he was alive at a time when black people in America were being degraded and demeaned and made to doubt their own humanity. To have Muhammed Ali burst into their lives, proclaiming that he could "Float like a butterfly; sting like a bee; The hands can't hit what the eyes can't see" was like a bolt of lightning on a dark night. Gena Golden said,
Ali taught us to love ourselves unapologetically. He made statements like “I’m so pretty!” while boldly and unabashedly telling the world that he is someone to be loved and adored. He demonstrated an outward expression of self-love when it was common place for television programs, magazine articles and radio ads that portrayed negative images of black people. When Ali, a man, and a boxer called himself pretty, it stirred feelings of self-love that most were unfamiliar with. It encouraged many to affirm their own beauty...
While the media, the government and various intuitions were persistent with their negative portrayal of African Americans, he probably sensed that the damaging messages were destroying the self-esteem and confidence of his people. He probably figured out that repetitive, negative messages that permeated the culture would create irreparable damage to the minds of the people. I want to believe that his goal was not only to distract and weaken his opponent but also to encourage all those that could see or hear him, to never doubt nor criticize themselves, but rather to offer themselves words of praise and encouragement at all times.
One of Muhammed Ali's most famous quotes is "I am the greatest; I said that even before I knew I was. I figured if I said it enough, I would convince the world that I was really the greatest." Knowing what we know now about self-affirmation, in convincing the world, he was probably also making it so.
I admire him for being an example of the power of words to transform a life. I also admire him for figuring out what he believed in and fighting for it. He's almost like a storybook hero in the way that he developed his own Honor Code and stuck to it, even through the most murky of circumstances. He allowed the Heavyweight Boxing Title to be stripped from him when he refused to fight in Vietnam.
He said, "My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big poweful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father...Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people?"
He didn't know how it would all turn out. He gave up everything to keep his integrity. It doesn't matter if I think he did the right thing or not. What matters is that he thought he was doing the right thing, and he was willing to give up everything for it.
I absolutely loved doing this challenge from Gretchen Rubin. However, I completely underestimated how long it would take. For some reason I thought I could spend half an hour on youtube and learn what needed to be learned. Half an hour got me through ONE video of hundreds. When Muhammed Ali died, the nation mourned. Here is Billy Crystal speaking at his funeral:
He was so much more than a fighter. He made all of our lives a little bit better than they were. He taught us that life is best when you build bridges between us, not walls. He is gone, but he will never die. He was my big brother." ~ Billy Crystal
"Impossible is just a word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing." ~ Muhammad Ali
In February of 2015 I wrote a post explaining that I needed to take some time off. Even before that, my blog list has a stop-and-start quality about it that shows I was struggling.
I didn't post at all in 2016.
I posted twice in 2017.
This is my 28th post in 2018! Woot!
I miss blogging. But...
How do you restart a blog that has lost all of its approximately 100 readers?
WHY do you restart a blog that was never that popular anyway?
Now that I'm such a different person, what would the purpose of my blog be?
Can I justify spending so much time on blogging?
Enter the A-Z challenge! Hundreds of potential readers. Hundreds of blogs that might help me find my way...I'd forgotten how much work this challenge is! Getting each day's post out there was only half the battle. Each day I would scan the day's master list looking for familiar blogs and then I would try to go to some random ones as well. There are some extremely talented bloggers out there!
I didn't even think to look at the A-Z Facebook page until I was doing the survey at the end. That might have simplified the whole process a little bit. Next year!
About my topic
I reviewed podcasts. It was great! It wasn't until about the letter R that I realized I was sick to death of podcasts, so I call that a success! I've got a pretty great podcast list now. I'm ready to take a break from adding and deleting podcasts, but a podcast list is meant to be a fluid thing, I've learned.
(Bizarrely, a pillow fight my daughter's fiance was involved in is mentioned on the podcast from Great Britain called No Such Thing as a Fish. When I told him, he said, "Of all the things to be famous for!" If you are interested, the episode was #214, No Such Thing as a Criminal in a Fabulous Hat.)
About networking
Podcasts are exactly like blogs! There are a few super popular ones, and a zillion more that flounder in spite of great content. I've been noticing this really interesting trend...in spite of their seeming to have nothing in common, a lot of my favorite podcasters appear as guests on each other's shows. Just today John Green from Dear Hank and John was a guest on Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, and they also had Gretchen Rubin from Happier on a couple of weeks ago. Those 3 podcasts are all in my top 5 favorite podcasts and they cover widely different topics. I learn from this the rather obvious lesson that networking must be important.
So what now?
I'm going to keep blogging. I'm not sure how much time I can spend promoting my blog, but I also know I'll feel a deep emptiness if I'm the only person who ever reads what I write, so that needs to be thought about.
One thing I'm really interested in is blogging about some of the challenges some of the self-help podcasts I listen to give. I had this idea while listening to Happier with Gretchen Rubin, episode 166: Watch Old Video Clips. What I do for that one will probably be my next blog post, and I will see where that takes me.
Wrap-up
This was successful for me! I've learned that I want to keep blogging, and I have at least a temporary category for what I will write about. I think once a week is a do-able goal to begin with. I've made some friends whose blogs I plan to continue visiting, and I hope you'll all come back and see what I do here. Thank you for helping me sort through some very difficult questions. Good luck to you!
