BoldUlysses.com

If nothing else, driving around Winston-Salem fosters a healthy hatred for stoplights. Holy cow. They’re evil. Every few hundred yards, always red, and fully half of them don’t have the magnetic pickup under the pavement that senses when a car is waiting, so they proceed through the whole light cycle no matter who’s there (“There’s nobody IN the left turn lane!”). I want roundabouts! I’m even willing to have enough faith in the average American driver to sincerely believe that he/she could master the roundabout concept–and that’s saying a lot.

I’ve been trying to mix up the music I listen to in the car. My cd wallet fits pretty well down in the door’s map pocket so I don’t venture to take it out much and switch up the cds–I just leave it there. Last week it finally came to a head, though, and after the fourth time thumbing through the case looking for something I wanted to listen to, finding nothing, sitting there in the driveway, car warming up, I just took the whole thing inside, scooped a few random untouched albums off the shelf and threw them in the car.

One of them I hadn’t listened to in a while: Jars of Clay’s The Eleventh Hour. I bought the cd when I was in Florida back in the summer of ’02, and I like it very much. I’m particularly fond of track 6, “Silence.” It fills the role on the album allocated to “Frail” on their second disc, Much Afraid, and sounds very much like the earlier song–atmospheric, orchestral, building slowly to a crescendo, slowly unveiling new sounds in the song in response to shifting emotions. There’s even a touch of a standard Portishead-like static and fuzz running throughout the song, though with nowhere near the gothic quality or contrast of the British band. The Jars album is stripped down from their earlier sound. I can hear it every time I listen. I remembered reading something about how The Eleventh Hour was the first album since their excellent first that the band had arranged, engineered and produced themselves. The lack of polish is certainly evident throughout the album, and serves some songs better than others.

As I listened to the song, I started thinking about that aspect of the album, and then about the nature of the band itself. It’s a core of four guys that have partnered together in the same endeavor for many years, through many albums and concerts and I’m sure many struggles, internal and otherwise. I thought about the success the band has had, and about the commitments each of the members must have made to stick together for as long as they have. I started to wonder what makes them stay. What kind of mindset must they have to reconcile themselves to working with the same group of people for so long? Is it the success that does it? The friendship? The fact that without music they’d have little else to do, that it’s their best shot at ambition, their best hand of cards? And what happens when a band member decides to leave a band? Do they feel like a failure? Or is it simply a transition?

Then it occurred to me that bands break up all the time, members leave, fundamental shifts occur. And we never hear about most of them. We’re too busy moving on to the next thing, the next sound, the next wave, the new, the fresh, the vanguard… Is that representative of our culture in general? Or does it even represent our natural way of thinking as humans, in a wider scope? I have a hunch failure is much more prevalent than we know, and that it happens all the time in fact. Businesses close up, go bankrupt, people get fired, flunk out of school, any number of things–all sorts of circumstantial letdowns happen all around us every day. And it’s understandable that we don’t hear about these things. In general, people aren’t overeager to broadcast or even quietly share things like that. But the end result, taking a few liberties of generalization, is that failure acquires a stigma, a negative characterization that’s applied across the board to most anything that bucks the trend of better, newer, higher, more… And some “failures” that shouldn’t be in that camp. Sometimes they’re just needed transitions. The societal paradigm is warped. But it still doesn’t help the fact we often feel so, so isolated when we’re in the throes of a letdown. Success is shared, but we bear the burden of failure alone. And I have a hunch that if we knew just how often people take a few steps back, as it were, we could at least draw some comfort from the knowledge that the current of the standards we see around us isn’t just passing us by–people would be more open and we could find solace in shared experiences instead of just sweeping them under the rug.

I dunno. It’s all wishful thinking. But I do a lot of (too much?) thinking these days and I’ve been revisiting my fear of failure here in Winston-Salem a lot lately. I failed in Florida–I returned home to North Carolina with a pocketful of change to my name and nothing worthwhile to show for my six months there except experiences which to this day have yet to demonstrate their purpose (though I have faith they will). I can’t let the same happen here, I tell myself. I can’t. But the intensity with which I feel that grasping, clawing for stability and sustenance makes me rethink its validity and appropriateness in my life with regards to who I am and Who my God is. And I am compelled to let go, open palms… It’s not about what I do, it’s about who I am and Who He is and who He wants me to be. I have a feeling I’ll be revisiting this for a lifetime.