Fire

Every now and again something comes along that knocks me off my feet of today and opens the locked gate of my youth. It reminds me that I am the sum of everything and everyone I have ever been in my life, that what I see in the mirror is not all that I am, that my aching back didn't always ache, that my weariness was once an energy which propelled me forward into an open life filled with newness and adventure.

It could be as easy as a song. 

A few days ago I watched the movie "Burnt" with Bradley Cooper about a chef who destroyed his career in Paris and was trying to rebuild it in London. I always watch the movie credits at the end of every movie I see (if possible), and I am always amazed at the amount of people who work to create that two-hour movie I just watched from the comfort of my home. 

Overlaying the credits for "Burnt" was one of most incredible songs I have heard in a very long time: "Fire" by Barns Courtney. It wove its way through my Baby Boomer psyche and slammed into my young self whom I thought was long gone. ("Renegades" by X-Ambassadors did the same thing a few years back, which I first heard on a Jeep Renegade commercial.)

I can't get enough of this song. It appears to be about the beginning of Courtney's musical career in which he experienced a lot of down times, but it also worked well with "Burnt" because both the movie and the song are about someone who is consumed with his passion and won't let it go, no matter what -- which is totally what I didn't do. I gave up. In fear, in practicality, with no self-confidence and no belief that I was any good. I gave up. Subsequently, I have spent most of my adult life wandering from career to career, home to home, looking for what I left behind, not understanding that the one I buried is still alive and breathing, even if I'm blind and deaf to this fact most of the time.

Thank you, Barns Courtney, for waking up the younger me, because that's where my creativity lies in waiting for older me to open the door and get going on who I should have been. Sometimes all it takes is a simple thing to make you realize that you're more than what or who you think you are, and that there's no time like the present to get on the train and see where it goes.