Into the Great Wide Open

My daughter is a big fan of Conor Oberst, and this morning she mentioned that the songs of his that seem the most positive to her are the ones that most people call bleak or depressing.

Example:




 I told her I thought that the way you heard a song had a lot to do with your own perspective on life.

That reminded me of a conversation I'd had with my sister long ago. She'd described Tom Petty's "Into the Great Wide Open" as negative and depressing, and I'd been surprised. See, I heard the sad story, the way things didn't go as expected, but I also heard, "The future was wide open..."




 Sure, I recognized the ironic use of the same phrase to portray endless possibility and endless blank space, but...well...what IS endless blank space if not endless opportunity?

At least, that's the way I've seen it for most of my adult life. And, when I had that conversation with my daughter this morning, I'd have told you that was still the way I saw it.

Sometimes, internal changes are the hardest to see.

The past 15 months have been quite a journey, more filled with change than any in a very long time. In the few months following the last presidential election, I said goodbye to two of the people I counted among my closest friends. The reasons were very different, but both were of that devastating nature that makes you wonder whether you ever really knew a person at all, and whether they ever knew you at all. That kind of discovery can make you question whether you can trust your own judgment about people. When it happens twice in three months, with people you've thought you were close to for more than a decade, it makes you pretty certain that you can't.

During that same few months, my daughter, who has been the focus of most of my adult life, turned 21. Shortly after, she broke up with her longtime boyfriend. It was a good choice for her, but one more big change, since he'd become a part of my family.

Quick summary: LOTS of new space in my life.

Just a few months earlier, I'd have seen that as a positive. See, as much as I love the people in my life, there's a significant part of me that's always yearned to be left alone to write. There's never been any question in my mind about what I would do with my "empty nest" years. But, there's always a glitch.

In the midst of all this, I had a "cardiac incident" of the "your blood pressure is on the verge of destroying your heart--get it down NOW if you want to keep functioning relatively normally" variety (as if I haven't been working fruitlessly toward that particular goal for nearly two decades).

The future wasn't looking so wide open. In fact, my health problems have always been the one obstacle I haven't been able to and didn't believe I could overcome.

I had a lot of work, and it was work I liked. I just kept raising my rates and it just kept rolling in anyway, and first I was booked a week out and then two and then a month, and then I was turning work away. It wasn't challenging work, but that was okay--I knew I could do it well and it paid well, and, though I didn't realize it at the time, I may have been afraid to commit to anything too challenging because something medical might crop up again.

It came anyway, as things do when the time is right. I'm working on a book about a legal/social issue I've felt strongly about for more than a decade. There's another interesting book with an interesting client waiting in the wings. A well-established company reached out to me to work on legal tech thought leadership pieces. My long-time favorite client wanted to re-up our work together.

I said yes to all of it and started cutting back on blogging and websites and the work that had been my bread and butter. But, I had a sense of anxiety I've rarely had about work before. I examined each project and couldn't find a reason. I'm confident in my ability to do each well. I'm not overbooked. They're all things I want to do.

Still, every time I passed up a website job or phased out a blogging client, that sense of anxiety reared it's head.

Until today.

Because this morning, I told my daughter that the way you heard a song depended on your outlook on the world. And, this evening, while I was fighting with all my might not to accept a safe and familiar website job, I opened Spotify and clicked on the "daily mix" they'd created for me, and the very first song they played was "Into the Great Wide Open."

I laughed out loud, as I always do when the message is so blatant.

The future IS wide open, and I don't need to hedge my bets.