Nat

I’ve become a big fan of the show, because I’ve always loved the spectacle of humans demonstrating their tremendous skill, the outcome of their great passion and effort. There are several contestants this year, among the women, who achieve great musicality when they sing. They don’t have to sell a song because they can inhabit it.

Tonight, Melinda Doolittle brought down the house singing “My Funny Valentine.” The phrasing was great. Her stage movements were engaging and well connected to the song. Her lower register was deep and vibrant. The judges loved it, and so did I.

I’ve also been thinking about a book I just started reading, “>Living Buddha, Living Christ, by Thich Nhat Hahn. In it, Nhat Hahn, the famous Vietnamese Buddhist, describes the many similarities between the Buddha and Jesus Christ. It’s very moving to see how he brings together two towering figures who embody different traditions and makes them examples of the same great enlightenment.

Greatness inspires me. Keep singing, Idols.

It’s sad to think of a week as something to get through, as if there were entire days of my life I am willing to give back. And yet there are times that are just like that. This week, in fact, I didn’t sleep much and staggered through the last few days, worried that I wasn’t giving anything my best shot.

This morning in the car I asked myself why I’m ok just to pass the time. I don’t yet have an answer, but I heard a radio show on the way home, Tom Ashbrook’s On Point, on which Charlie LeDuff discussed his book US Guys. LeDuff, a Pulitzer prize-winning former NYTimes reporter, traveled the US for a year and wrote about how average American men find their lives.

Like me, many are looking for meaning and wrestle with a seeming distance between their expectations and the ordinary challenges they face. LeDuff has a raspy voice, a dazzling need to get to the bottom of how people feel, and a great knack for storytelling. The conversation drew in as callers a very different type of man from the show’s usual audience. I really recommend you listen to the show. There a just lots of guys out there who find their adult lives a tough slog, despite having jobs, families, and entertainment.

I think we are more starved for meaning and purpose than we even admit. LeDuff kept returning to basic values. Although “life is messy and complicated, and self-loathing and funny,” he recommends listening to your mother, going back to church, treating people with kindness and respect, and living within your means.

There is always more, always better. It’s just that the more may have to do with creating more rather than acquiring it.

Today I was reading a newsletter from Apple about a music journalist who uses several Apple hardware and software products to produce his podcasts on the music industry. As I often think when reading about artists, I bemoaned the fact that I’m too old to learn how to use all of these tools. Then I caught myself.

Usually when I have these thoughts, it’s in the context of some job I would like to do but didn’t train for. I assume that learning music and radio production would take too many hours of study and experimentation to allow me to then apply those skills to produce my own podcast.

Today, for the first time, it struck me that I’ve essentially begun to divide the world of new opportunities into ones that I’m too old to start. But that’s a completely crazy way to think. Plenty of young people learn an instrument part time while they are going to school. Plenty of adults go to school at night while working full time jobs all day. Besides, I loved school of all kinds and am a very fast and enthusiastic learner.

So when did I tell myself that it was too late to take on learning something completely new? I guess when I decided that I could only start to do something if I were going to become outstanding at it. It was a shock to reveal to myself my own ridiculous standards for starting something.

I realized that I might get a great thrill out of learning to produce music on a computer, just from other people’s samples, just to be able to create a podcast and set up a web site. And if I can only afford 2 hours a week to practice, then it will just take me a while to learn.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a little while to learn. Michael’s been teaching me that for years as he works on his photography and guitar. I gave up acquiring new skills years ago, and it’s been killing me.

I’ll be on the lookout for new things to try.

Christopher Lydon, the brilliant host of the Open Source radio program, hosted a program tonight in honor of the Harold Ramis/Bill Murray movie “Groundhog Day.” It’s one of my favorites and one of my wife’s favorites, which is really nice because we don’t always like the same movies.

Lydon is a huge fan of the movie and feels, as I do, that it will be an enduring classic of American art. The question of the show was, “Why?” Lydon described the observers who call it a Buddhist fable, in which Bill Murray’s character suffers an endless cycle of rebirth until he finds redemption. Harold Ramis, the director and co-writer, talked about the cycles Murray’s character, Phil, goes through when he finds he’s trapped in the same repeated day: hedonism, manipulation, rage, impotence, resignation, and then grace.

Stanley Cavell, the Harvard philosopher, who loves the movie, talked about mourning in relation to the film. Mourning, he said, is fundamentally a condition relieved by repetition. We go back to the location of our pain again and again until we learn how to handle it.

Mostly, they all agreed, it’s about accepting the gift of managing days, experiences, and lives that are fundamentally routine and ordinary on the one hand and beautiful on the other. I think the movie’s point is that desolation yields to generosity.
There is no cheap Hollywood myth here. Instead, there’s the oppotunity to see our ordinary experience as our chance to make something special of ourselves and our world. Murray’s weatherman grows poetic when he finally accepts his fate. He embraces all that Punxatawny is, rather than lament all that it isn’t. I’m going to work on that, my dread of the ordinary.

Ultimately, the commentators decided, we can’t change our circumstances without changing our approach to them.

“This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalms 118:24).

Happy Groundhog Day.