Day 4

In a song called "To Live is to Fly" Townes Van Zandt writes about life. He uses the metaphor of flying, as the title suggests, and then he offers a bit of advice in the form of a refrain: "Shake the dust off of your wings/ and the sleep out of your eyes." It is good advice, I should think, as far as it means "wake up, get moving." We have a natural tendency to drift through life, or parts of our lives, in all sorts of ways -- from being too busy to notice, on one end of the spectrum, to being plain lazy.

I first remember hearing Van Zandt in a used bookstore in Dover, New Hampshire. An album of duets, Van Zandt and various other singers, played on the store stereo system as I wandered through the many rooms of seven foot book shelves. The music drew my attention and held it. Many of the voices were familiar and I knew a fair number of the songs. So I inquired, then later bought the album.

Van Zandt is a terrific song writer. Or was. He died too young from what we used to call hard living. However useful his advice, and however compelling his songs, he would not, generally speaking, be a reliable tour guide through life.

In the middle of "To Live is to Fly" are these lines: "Where you been is good and gone/ All you keep is the getting there." I am not sure I can do justice to the song by picking it apart this way; but these lines speak to me in a particular way right now. The interesting -- and perhaps we might infer meaningful -- part of life is not so much the facts that accumulate, its history, as it is the narrative, the journey itself.

In the next 48 hours, Lord willing, my wife and I will board a plane on the first leg of what should be a remarkable year for us. The story of how we get there and how we get back, and the story of what happens in the middle, is what will we will bring back, what we will have to offer. Do it. Pay attention. This advice I plan to follow. Journey is both our baggage and our calling card.