How we live our life

I'm listening to Josh Ritter's Thin Blue Flame and I find myself asking and wondering about how we live our life.

He very clearly takes the concept and the elements he sees in life and allows them to surround him, consume him. And then pours them out into song-- after thoroughly shaken, not stirred.

You see, it is that thoroughly shaken portion that means so much. It is one thing experience life around you, wow, the sky looks amazing tonight, but it is something completely different to allow yourself to be shaken inside, from the roots, by what it is you are experiencing.

Think about the things in life, the moments you have lived where you felt as though your world was truly shaken. So many of those things are the trials and the unbelievable becoming believable only because they happened a little too close to home. But what happens when we let the majority of our experiences in life to shake us?

I would like to push it a bit further and say that I believe that they do shake us-- all things that we truly experience. But we experience so much at once. We more often than not do not slow ourselves enough so that we can reflect upon and come to see and understand what each element is, embracing it. Sometimes we do, but frequently it becomes clouded by all of the other elements of life around us.

Which leads to the question, how do we experience each element when there are so many flying at us all at once?

Sometimes we can't. Sometimes we have to just sit back and take it all in. Sometimes we actually have to speed it up to a point of exhilaration. But in the end, it is all there within us, a part of us. It is there for our experiencing, it is a matter of asking to what degree do we choose to experience it?

I think of the pure simplicity of a hug-- something I am truly fond of, especially when shared with someone I care deeply about --and the varying elements present within it. We're open in those few moments, vulnerable and excepting. Sometimes it has a mystifyingly powerful healing ability to it; have you ever experienced that, where all the hurt, the worry, the anxiety, the stress, even the tears suddenly slide away-- you can't quite explain why but all of a sudden everything feels soo much better than you knew it could within that moment? Even more, do you see, do you take in the experience when you have done that for someone else? Have you allowed yourself to feel and see the gift you just gave another?

So often we have no idea how much of an impact we have on the world around us. We have little insight into the depths of how much we have changed, truly changed, the lives of not just one but each and every individual around us. And yet, we can see, even if just in hindsight, how powerfully the people around us have influenced us. I find it interesting how we're still somewhat oblivious to the role we have in others.

Maybe it's a part of our culture. Maybe its not. But I know that it's more than just maybe a part of my life. I need to make sure that I am aware of how I impact the people in my life just as I find a need to be aware of, to take note of, and to (in my instance) write about the way the world and all that are and is in it affect my life.

Let it affect you.
Let yourself experience what you usually gloss over.
Let yourself love to live what used to be unlived.

"I became a thin blue flame..."