Hope Is a Matter of Vision: Excerpts from Middling

I put out an occasional newsletter about music, books, work, and getting older. You can subscribe to it in the sidebar. My next issue is coming out next week and I'd love for you to get it. Here's a taste of what happens there: This is from last summer's issue, in which I reflect on the experience of turning fifty.

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Our publishing house sponsored an online event called the Spiritual First Aid Summit. It’s still online if you’d like to see it; really great and practical presentations from a broad swath of religious leaders, hosted by the Humanitarian Disaster Institute. Woven into the event was our recent release The Message of Hope, a curated collection of passages from The Message version of the Bible.

I’m very proud of this little collection, which isn’t just some hope-bludgeon that denies and avoids hard times and hard things. The book begins not with hope but lament, because hope is not something we begin with but something we search for. Lament is then put in conversation with the promises God makes in the Scriptures, which points us to an assurance of God’s love and newfound trust that God is with us and for us. Ultimately hope is a matter of vision—a way of seeing the world without being undone by what we see. Some projects work on me as I work on them; The Message of Hope is one of those. As Emily Dickinson writes of hope,

I’ve heard it in the chilliest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet—never—in Extremity
It asked a crumb—of me.

Or, as God puts it in the Scriptures,

Your God is present among you,
A strong Warrior there to save you.
—Zephaniah 3:17, The Message

A Soft Soundtrack of Lowered Expectations: Excerpts from Middling

I put out an occasional newsletter about music, books, work, and getting older. You can subscribe to it in the sidebar. My next issue is coming out next week and I'd love for you to get it. Here's a taste of what happens there: This is from last summer's issue, in which I reflect on the experience of turning fifty.

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I once read an entire book dedicated to the big transition in pop music that took place in 1970, the year of my birth. As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, the book argues, a playlist of social disruption ceded airtime to a soft soundtrack of lowered expectations. The Beatles broke up, Simon and Garfunkel broke up, Crosby, Stills and Nash broke up. James Taylor moved into the void with his Sweet Baby James, a record that included, among other things, a veiled reference to the collapse of his own sixties-era band (“Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground”) and a cover of “Oh! Susanna,” a Stephen Foster song first made famous by minstrel singers in blackface in the decade before the Civil War. Some progress is not progress.

The book is self-servingly myopic, largely ignoring what was taking place in every genre of pop music (let alone all other music forms) outside of its preselected subjects. But I enjoyed reading it nonetheless, and (melancholic that I am) I find it compelling that the year of my birth could be considered a year of a kind of musical death.

Some spectacular records were released in 1970, including Sweet Baby James (“Oh! Susanna” notwithstanding, it deserves its popularity), Bridge over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel, Moondance by the great Van Morrison, and the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar, not to mention two records from the Beatles (Hey Jude and the immortal Let It Be) and Stevie Wonder’s wonderful Signed, Sealed, and Delivered. You can hear the sixties-fatigue in the title tracks from The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel, and in Wonder’s plaintive “Heaven Help Us All.”

We are also, notably, confronted with the harsh reality that even when we grow tired of the hard things in the world, they don’t just go away because we wish it. As CSNY sang about the Kent State shooting that year, “How can you run," they shouted in four-part harmony, "when you know?” Heaven help us all, indeed.

When I Was Younger: Excerpts from Middling

I put out an occasional newsletter about music, books, work, and getting older. You can subscribe to it in the sidebar. My next issue is coming out next week and I'd love for you to get it. Here's a taste of what happens there: This is from last summer's issue, in which I reflect on the experience of turning fifty.

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I used to bob or bang my head in unison with The Who (“Hope I die before I get old!”) and later R.E.M. (“I can’t see myself at thirty!”). Somewhere along the way I started to stare my future in the face to a soundtrack of Neil (ironically) Young: “Old man, take a look at my life; I’m a lot like you.” The words of Steely Dan (“Are you reeling in the years? Stowing away the time?”) sent me into moments of circumspection teetering on the edge of existential crisis. I began to bob and bang my head to the (ironically) Old 97s (“I used to be the new kid!”) and to Ben (putting the old in) Folds: “Once you wanted revolution; now you’re the institution” and “He’s forgotten but not yet gone.”

Now the day has come. I am what I am, and what I am is old. If I happen to forget now and then (something that happens to those of us of advanced age), there’s always some snarky millennial nearby ready to shock me back into awareness.

People who are older still than I am occasionally pat me on the head when I fret about the aging process, which is comforting in a way. I have ample role models for aging well. But it’s the number—the roundness of it, the ffffiness of it—that stresses me out. I’m closer to a century of life than I am to my birth—a fact that naively presupposes that I’ll make it to a hundred without my heart stopping or my bank account running out of money. Fifty is a slap in the face, a rude awakening to the reality that we are all of us living on borrowed time.

Shortly before John Lennon turned twenty-five he wrote the immortal words “When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody’s help in any way. But now those days are gone; I’m not so self-assured.” Isn’t that cute? That was less than a year before he called the Beatles more popular than Jesus. It was, in any case, an insightful line: The young are blessed with audacity, a sense of permanence and invulnerability. Only time can whittle away at it.

Fifteen years later John wrote a song called “Borrowed Time,” drafted shortly before he turned forty and recorded a few months before he was shot and killed. By this time “When I was younger” has given way to “Now I am older”; the desperation that fueled “Help” has given way to an optimism born of humility and hope:

The more that I see the less that I know for sure... The future is brighter and now is the hour.

Humility and hope are not bad gifts to carry with me into my fifties, I suppose. I observe them in my own elders, the people I look to as guides for this new season. I look for them in myself as well, and on good days I find them there. On bad days I try to remind myself that they’re only hidden, not lost, and i can still recover them if I put in the effort.