About a year ago, my brother talked to me about the word “experience” and how important it is in shaping us as individuals. For years I’ve been seeking to find the roots of who I am and who I am becoming. I think I may have learned something profound about myself here recently, so I put it in a song.
I remember it vividly
Asking myself why you had to leave
Asking why I felt so empty
Never understand why you had to leave
Looking back it all shapes me
Makes me the man I’m supposed to be
Death is a funny thing you see
It made me the man I’m supposed to be
Wake me up from this bad dream
Is what I said and constantly screamed
God, my God, why do You do this to me?
Years go by and I begin to see
When I was in fifth grade, my best friend died in a freak accident and it wrecked me as a young boy. It made me scared of making friends because I was afraid to lose them. It made me overly cautious with relationships in general because I had deep fears of abandonment. For the longest time I looked at that experience as a bump in the road but I’ve come to see it as a beautiful part of who I am.
Chasing light to me means seeking the good in everything and everyone. As a kid were you ever afraid of the trees and the shadows they cast into your room at night? The ominous shape of the limbs can be really frightening as a kid. It’s interesting because as a child, you don’t have the knowledge that they are just trees - to you, it seems like they are monsters. Then, you inch over to the window and muster the courage to open the blinds and, in the light, you see that its just a tree after all - you’re able to see the beauty and how perfectly crafted it is and then you feel silly for ever thinking it was a bad thing.
When I put those things together in my mind, I began to see the beauty of my experiences in this life, even the most difficult ones. As a creative, I look for ways to craft something beautiful so that people are able to see what my experience in life has been like and so they are able to see how it has shaped me. I don’t do this so that people will see the light in the same way that I do. I share my experience hoping that it will help others to see things from a new perspective, to see things in a different way than they normally would see it.
That is why I wrote Death is a Funny Thing - so that people could gaze into my past and see why I am the way I am. I am the man that I am supposed to be because of my experience and it’s as simple as that.
You can listen to Death is a Funny Thing by Wise Words on Music and Spotify later this afternoon.
