Each week I like to talk about a song. Sometimes it doesn’t happen, even months have gone by without my sharing, but as I was looking for a song last time to share I came across this one. I saved it.
I’ve never ran across a song where the first five lines were written about me quite so perfectly. Although the song is written about a man in his early forties seeing x-rays of his father, I take more as a autobiographical account through most of the song in regards to myself.
The Song
For Tim McGraw, the American Country music artist who had the number 1 hit of the year for 2004 with Live Like You Were Dying written by Tim Nichols and Craig Wiseman, it was more personal as his own father, estranged as he was, professional baseball pitcher Tug McGraw suffered from a brain tumor and died in January of the same year.
The Moment
Life has moments in it that wake you up. Sometimes they wake you up after they knock you out. Why my particular moment decided to add Amnesia to the mix I’m not certain and I don’t question. I just move along and enjoy life as best I can.
Enter the Beatles
The other song I considered today was While My Guitar Gently Weeps by George Harrison and the Beatles. Harrison wrote the song after reading the I Ching.
“seemed to me to be based on the Eastern concept that everything is relative to everything else… opposed to the Western view that things are merely coincidental.”~Harrison, George (2002). I, Me, Mine. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
He went to his parents home and decided to write a song on the first two words he saw in a book he opened. Gently Weeps.
Harrison Mistaken
Harrison got it wrong. There might be people who believe in coincidences but this Westerner doesn’t. This Westerner in the sense Harrison was referring to in the Christian sense knows there are no coincidences. You see I know there are actions taking place in the world with a reaction to follow.
My ‘accident’ was no accident. I see it as something that was made to happen for a reason. No, I do not think God thought to do me harm, He does not do that. But what He does it take that moment and give one the opportunity to do good from it.
I haven’t done much good as opposed to before other than begin blogging. But a great many things have happened since then. Some have come to fruition already, and others are of the slow growing variety of tree of my life. Either way I will enjoy picking the fruit and enjoying the taste of it.
Is It Ever Too Late
Some people might read this and be angry because their situation is worse than mine and I dare to say that we are given the opportunity to make something out of it. Perhaps a person has days to live or months. Is a second to little to do something positive and leave this world with something of yourself that others might look to in an inspirational way? A squeeze of the hand between an estranged father in a hospital bed and his son is not too late to make a memorable moment.
I was in my early forties
With a lot of life before me
When a moment came that stopped me on a dime
I spent most of the next days, looking at the x-rays
Talking bout the options and talking bout sweet time
I asked him when it sank in
That this might really be the real end
How’s it hit ‘cha when you get that kind of news?
Man, what’d ya do?
And he said
I went skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I’d been denyin’
And he said, Someday I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin’
He said, I was finally the husband
That most the time I wasn’t
And I became a friend, a friend would like to have
And all of a sudden goin’ fishin’
Wasn’t such an imposition
And I went three times that year I lost my dad
Well I, I finally read the good book
And I took a good long hard look
At what I’d do if I could do it all again
And then
I went skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I’d been denyin’
And he said, Someday I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin’
Like tomorrow was a gift
And ya got eternity to think about what to do with it
What did you do with it?
What did I do with it?
What would I do with it?
Skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I watched an eagle as it was flyin’
And he said, Someday I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin’
To live like you were dyin’
To live like you were dyin’
To live like you were dyin’
To live like you were dyin’
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