Been a while. Sorry about that! Here's a post I just wrote today on my other blog (a less philosophical one, generally - musically-focused; you can read it here if you like):
I hear that there are folks out there who are displeased with the "different" sound on Snow Patrol's latest EP.
There are always people displeased by any change. People tend to keep the familiar in a bloody, white-knuckled death grip and attempt to block out all that's new and different, either out of sheer inertia or because of a misguided sense that sameness is safe, that unyielding firmness in everything will allow the storms of life to pass them by.
I wonder if those people have ever surveyed the damage after a major storm. I grew up in eastern North Carolina, where hurricanes are an occasional fact of life. It's a place well-greened with trees, from the tall, solid pines shooting straight up toward the sky to gently swaying maples.
Most of the time, NC loses several trees to the high winds (and sometimes flooding) of a hurricane. But it's not the green, tender saplings that tend to suffer the greatest losses. I have seen young trees bent almost double to the ground in high winds, and yet they survive. The inflexible, unbending trunks of hundred-year-old trees, meanwhile, are snapped like twigs in the storm's fury.
They can't adapt; they can't bend in the storms of life...so they die.
We die, too, when we become so rigid, so set in our ways, that we can't cope with changes (large or small) in life. When you refuse to embrace change or to ever change yourself, you enter a dangerous soul stagnation. You wilt, from the inside out, until there's nothing left but a bitter, brittle monument to everything you never were, never did, never allowed in.
Be dynamic. Live. Thank goodness Snow Patrol doesn't stagnate! Their older music is fabulous; I've no doubt the new music will be too, and I can't wait to see where the journey takes them as a band and me as a curious, adventurous listener. I'm grateful for ever-expanding horizons.
