Author: patmcg

creativity · Me · Music

“What you don’t know, you can feel it somehow.” 🎤

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I always liked the song Beautiful Day for its optimism and presence.

It’s a beautiful day. Don’t let it get away.

Sure, that’s the obvious takeaway and a great reminder that every day counts.

But the last part of the song has been inspiring me even more as I dig into a scary new skill, which I hope is the right kind of difficult for me: playing, singing, and eventually writing my own songs. 😱

I do not have a good track record here so far.

I have spent most of my life as the kind of guy who could play Stairway to Heaven on guitar and be done with it. “I’m a guitarist.” 🤷🏻‍♂️ Then I recorded a cover with a friend and built up some confidence.

What I really want is to do find my own voice. Literally.

Despite never considering myself a singer (and consistently receiving negative feedback whenever I have tried 😆) I am jumping into singing with the help of an expert music teacher who always sees the best possibilities.

And that’s half the journey.

Touch me, take me to that other place
Reach me, I know I’m not a hopeless case

Which brings me to the best part of Beautiful Day: the last bit, the part about forgetting what you don’t have now and feeling your way, somehow, into the new.

What you don’t have, you don’t need it now
What you don’t know, you can feel it somehow

Stay tuned. 🎤

What a beautiful day.

History · Quotes · The World

“When you go to the Middle East, you see immediately how people are imprisoned by history.”

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I keep trying to explain this Israel-Hamas war to my kids, and it’s really so caught up in the past, both near and distant. Repeatedly, one side’s autonomy, safety, and identity is violated by the other. And it’s piled up over time to the current conflict.

The Daily tackles this history in their 1948 episode, describing an “arsenal of memory” that gets “chiseled in stone” to define each side’s grievances.

When you go to the Middle East, you see immediately how people are imprisoned by history, the especially in Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Daily

It’s understandable but tragically and obviously unhelpful.

Yes, the past is full or pain and terror. Don’t get stuck in it – move past it like any wise person would do.

Right actions for the future are the best apologies for wrong ones in the past.

Tryon Edwards, theologian

And yes, it can be done.

Ireland put a similar conflict behind it: a centuries-old conflict of two intertwined groups of people involving religion, culture, territorial disputes, terror, violence, and injustice.

They ended up with a two-state solution: Ireland and the UK. There is peace and prosperity. People move freely between the countries. There are no checkpoints, walls, vengeance deaths, or bombings.

There are pubs and museums, a peaceful countryside, and a booming film industry.

The past is recognized and understood but no longer used to justify self-destructive, violent behavior. The “Troubles” are gone, but not forgotten.

The world needs to step up and make this happen in the Middle East. Doing so will require setting aside some fear, which is just a mind killer, but a peaceful solution can happen because it has happened elsewhere.

Which one would you pick?