music

When your trip goes awry – Part 5

by Steve Brock on January 31, 2013

The combined episodes of having one flight cancelled, being denied a second, making a third and finally arriving at my destination don’t tell the full story.

Here’s the background: If you’d been flying a ton for most of December and you were in, say the Midwest until Thursday and had other meetings in say, Orlando, Florida the following Monday, what would you do? Spend all day Thursday flying home to Seattle then all day Sunday flying to Florida? Or might you think, “I’ll fly directly to Florida, save a day in the air, get some work done in the hotel and be fresh as a daisy for Monday’s meetings?”

Yeah. Me too.

Except that Thursday ran me ragged due to having a cold and the stress of flight delays. And then along comes Friday.

My hotel (a Hyatt no less, located inside the Orlando airport) lacks wifi. I spend the whole day on my cell phone or trying to find the elusive hot spot at the airport just to get some emails out. Overall, the day is frustrating and I wonder more than once if I should have just flown home Thursday. I could have avoided the last two days that have been as much fun as an extended stay at the Laundromat.

But I would also have missed what happened Friday night.

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My client (who has become a great friend) has invited me to Andrew Peterson’s “Behold the Lamb of God” concert this Friday evening here in Orlando. I love Andrew Peterson’s music and his books for young adults. But I’ve never seen him perform live.

The concert is wonderful. It starts with the various muscians on this tour performing their own works. It then moves to a musical account of, as they put it, “The true tall tale of the Christ child.” I am enchanted and moved and, for the first time this season, begin to feel as if Christmas is indeed coming.

Then, amidst all this expectation of Christmas arrives something unexpected.

To explain one of his songs, Andrew tells of reluctantly reading his son’s favorite book, The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Favorite? I saw the movie a few years back, the old one with Gregory Peck. I could relate to Andrew’s hesitancy to read the book. You won’t find it in the dictionary under “happy endings.” It’s like Old Yeller: “boy meets pet, boy falls in love with pet, boy has adventures with pet, crisis occurs, pet dies.” Not exactly uplifting.

Deer

Yet there’s more to it than a sad end to the family pet deer. What I had missed was what Andrew saw in the book: The “yearling” is not the pet fawn so much as the boy, young Jody Baxter. And what dies in the book is not just a deer, but the innocence of youth.

I cannot tell you why his explanation of the book and the corresponding song struck me as they did. But as he described his own mourning for the passing of childhood and the hard realities of adulthood, I understood. I understood immediately what he meant and what he felt. I even knew, in that moment, why it was so hard for me to get here, why I responded almost as a child would to the minor inconvenience of delayed flights and why these words and this song matter to me.

We all have missing pieces within us. Unfinished business. Places within we know to be ours even though we’ve forgotten or misplaced them as we grow into adulthood and beyond. And in rare moments, they open to us and we make sense of them even if we can’t explain them. So it was for me.

Hard travel pummels us. It also tenderizes us and makes us available to what God would reveal and would give us. I received a gift that night that I cannot explain to anyone fully. I only know that I was supposed to be there, to hear a strange tale and beautiful music. And to realize that what it took to arrive here only made the receiving better.

And so I use this trip as a marker. An asterisk to set at the end of any future grumbling sentences I might utter during another hard trip. A reminder that I cannot judge any journey until I reach the end. For the journey I think I’m taking is rarely the one I’m actually on. The story is not always what I think it’s about. And the destination can be someplace far different than where I thought I was heading.

 

If you want to know how I got to this point and you haven’t read them yet, check out Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4

2 comments

The unimportance of travel

by Steve Brock on February 1, 2012

Several weeks ago, I used the example of The Civil Wars concert to illustrate my first entry of the series, You Had to Be There. I received many comments (mostly by email or ways other than comments on this site which, you realize of course, you can use…). Most of those comments related to the video and the group.

Fine. 

I’m glad to introduce music to people since it plays such an important role in my life and that of many others.

Then, in Part 4 of that series, I used a photo of my dog Ginger to illustrate the point of how our senses on a trip are more attuned and alive, like those of a dog. And what did I hear back on that profound topic? “Oh, what a cute dog!”

To be fair, many of you commented on the travel aspects, but those were the minority comments. Which leads me to this chilling conclusion:

Who are you calling cute?

Most of you don’t really care that much about travel all the time.

And to that I say:

“Good.”

Neither do I.

Gasp! How can that be? The Meaningful Traveler himself doesn’t care about travel?

Not all the time, no. Here’s why.

Travel is extraordinary. We don’t do it very often though we may dream of it much of the time. So it is right that travel for most of us is a secondary thought. Music or dogs or other interests occupy our time more because they exist in the places where we live. They are part of our everydayness.

Travel, at least for most of us, isn’t. Travel is special or it should be. As I’ve found out with business travel, you do it too much and it becomes just another routine.

Remember: Every day is not your birthday.

And that’s a good thing.

So it is only right that travel retains its special place in our lives, something that we look forward to for adventure and escape and even meaning. For when it becomes part of our bread-and-butter existence, the glow fades.

Having said that, I also think that we can learn from travel and try to apply some of that glow, that special-ness to our daily lives so that our daily routines become something more.

I'll never be able to smell what Ginger does, but I can enjoy watching her "scent the wind"

When we do, I can listen to a song by say, The Civil Wars, and smile just a bit more. Or I can look at that big snout of my favorite pooch, Ginger, and remember that I will never sense the smells she does, but I can enjoy watching her do so. I can be thankful for her and for so many things I might not notice had I not traveled.

So even though travel isn’t important ALL the time in your life, there’s value in travel and thinking about travel even when we’re not thinking about travel, if you know what I mean.

9 comments

You had to be there – Part 1

by Steve Brock on December 26, 2011

As my seventeen-year-old son Sumner and I exit the theatre, neither of us speaks. We prefer to hold private our own assessments of the concert we have just seen, afraid to leak our confidences to the passing crowds or to risk the possibility of misunderstanding each other’s true sentiments. A few blocks later, however, we ensconce ourselves within the Cone of Silence (otherwise known as our car).

Sumner is the first to venture forth and he does so boldly: “That was the best concert I’ve ever been to,” he announces, all cards on the table.

I hesitate a moment, then reply much like the young teen who has just been informed by the object of his intense crush that she likes him. “Really?” I probe, not sure if Sumner is genuine or practicing some new style of sarcasm picked up at school or, alas, learned from me and genetically modified.

“Oh my gosh, yes! They were amazing!” he says. While my youngest son Connor, who is 14, still employs the word AWESOME for all utterances of excitement or joy, Sumner has matured in his own vocabulary.

Unfortunately, at this moment, he has hit the point where no words suffice to adequately convey the height of his feelings. So tonight, “amazing” will do just fine.

Now, having vulnerably declared his position, he retreats. “What did you think?” he inquires, a hint of hesitation lining his question. I remain stone-faced as long as I can until tenderness for my son’s brave pronouncement and my own enthusiasm break me and I blurt out, “They were AWESOME!” This gives you a sense of the level at which my own emotive vocabulary is stuck.

We now make up for the silence of our walk to the car by talking over one another in our enthusiastic attempt to convince each other of what we clearly already agree on. We dissect, scrutinize and mutually praise each detail of the performance. Then, about ten minutes into our fevered admiration fest we hit a potential snag: we realize there is no way we can possibly explain how excellent our evening was to any other human being.

 And therein lies the age-old problem particularly common in travel: we come home and find we are unable to do much more than reduce an extraordinary experience down to five simple words: “You had to be there.”

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“You had to be there” is our fallback position when our experiences exceed our ability to describe them or when the joke we just told goes over about as well as a hamburger stand in Delhi. But these words are more than a trite line thrown to those on the outside of a joke or travel experience. They highlight a concept rich with extended meaning, a phrase that operates on more levels than a Bernie Madoff investment scheme.

Over the next several entries here at The Meaningful Traveler, we’ll explore some of those multiple ways of appreciating the phrase, “You had to be there.” But for now, let me explain this particular incident.

Sumner and I had just witnessed a performance in Seattle by The Civil Wars, a duo who play a mixture of music loosely categorized as Americana. Don’t let the cleavage, melodramatic filming or Johnny Depp-look-a-likeness in the following video distract you from two very talented performers.

 

This video of their biggest hit, Poison and Wine, is by its nature, a music video. But the live performance – two singers and a single guitar for all but two songs – was something incredible. From their timing and banter with the audience and each other to their haunting harmonies and musicianship, Joy Williams and John Paul White are something to behold. Even superstar Adele (for whom The Civil Wars opened earlier this year) has stated that, “The Civil Wars are the best live band I have ever seen.”

Sumner and I would agree. But to tell you all this or even for you to check out their videos won’t quite cut it. That’s the problem with such experiences. Words, photographs or even videos only go so far. When we fully engage in an experience all attempts to convey it will come up short.

I can tell you the concert was great. But really all I can say that will do it justice is this:

You had to be there.

To be continued…

Or read the rest of the series: Part 2, Part 2 1/2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5

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Still here? Then check out this other, simpler video by The Civil Wars:

 

8 comments

Traveling Light – Part 1

by Steve Brock December 13, 2011

Sometimes you just have to get away from it all – literally – to appreciate what Christmas is all about and to be…illuminated.

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Laughing with God

by Steve Brock December 7, 2011

It’s easy to laugh at God or discount the divine when things are going well. But hit a rough spot on a trip – or in life – and then see who’s laughing…

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Meaningful travel & transactional relationships – Part 3

by Steve Brock June 8, 2011

The most meaningful aspect of transactional relationships is sometimes the transaction itself as we discovered by accident when buying a unique musical instrument in Peru.

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Just for you

by Steve Brock September 3, 2010

Why is it that sometimes you fall in love with a song or a place and no one else is moved by it? What do you do? The helpful answer may be closer than you think…

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