I enjoyed ANOTHER Stars victory with my daughter last night.  During the intermission between the 2nd and 3rd periods, there was a tribute to Bob Gainey, who was instrumental in bringing the Stars to Dallas from Minnesota.  In keeping with the moment, they played a Smashing Pumpkins song I’m sure you’ve all heard…called “Tonight, Tonight”.  I turned to Scottie, who was using my iPhone to play peg-jump, I said, “hey, now’s your chance to ‘Shazam’!”  She quickly captured the song so I could be reminded to buy it later.  Unbeknownst to me, Billy Corgan is one of those crazy strange people who doesn’t want his music sold through Apple, so I was left to just watching the video on YouTube (which is now blocked in the US).  By the way, the video was AWESOME and weird!  The Wikipedia entry on the song is very enlightening – and it echoed much of what the AAC printed as the video played in the arena.

But it wasn’t the video, or the Smashing Pumpkins, or the guys on the ice who were also trying to smash each others’ pumpkins that gave me the inspiration.  It wasn’t the story about Bob Gainey, or even the feel-good moment when last night’s Stars stick-kid of the game (who was a goalie) got the chance to go stand next to Turco, the Stars goalie, for the National Anthem, and it wasn’t even the fun the little one and I had as we walked back to the car trying to sneak a spank or reverse kick on each other’s butt (all the way back to the car).  But if it hadn’t been for last night’s game, I doubt the sequence of events that occurred would’ve had the chance to occur as they did…let me explain.

When I clicked the Wikipedia entry, my eyes were drawn to the Composition and Lyrics which included the following statement: “Lyrically, “Tonight, Tonight” hangs together with the rest of the Mellon Collie, which is a concept album, as a symbol for the cycle of life and death.  The lyrics of the song have been called a “story of urgency and longing” and were compared to Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.”

That statement hit me on two sides…first, I had to take a closer look at the lyrics, which, as always, I’ve included at the end of this message for you.  There in the second run of the chorus it was, “In the resolute urgency of now.” If anything rings in your ears on that one, recall my earlier notes about MLK.  Here’s another reference…a reference by Billy Corgan of all people.  Life flies by and the words of this song are almost profound in their message.  And second, the reference to Herrick’s poem brought back one of my favorite movies of all time, “Dead Poets Society” – I believe this is one of the poems they read in their hideaway, but I’m not certain.  Still, memories came rushing back of the messages of that movie…again, seize the day, because we are all food for worms.

One line in the song says, “We will never be the same…the more you change the less you feel.” Wow…is that right?  Think about it…have you become numb to everything, or just the past?  I’ll tell you my perspective, there’s so much of my past that I’ve sealed in my chest that the chest is now overflowing.  I’ve talked with a few of you who enjoy your feelings…you enjoy the ups in life so much that you’re willing to tolerate the downs.  Others are so afraid of downs that you don’t really get to enjoy many ups.  I claim to be the former but am probably closer to the latter, if not somewhere centered in between.  But have I changed so much that I can’t feel?  What happens when somebody from that past comes up holding a key to that chest?  For me, Facebook has done an amazing job in handing keys out to people from my past who have every bit of the ability to unlock it and see inside.

I spent an hour on the phone with an old friend last night.  Anytime you’re in a rut, try connecting to the past and find out you’re not alone.  We never thought we’d endure our personal dramas when we were young, but we did.  Folks, another good friend of mine congratulated me not long ago by saying, “congrats Tim, you’re living.” Congratulations?  Seriously?  For the pain?  Think about it, she was right.  This is life…this is what we “get to do”.  But anyway, as I talked with my old friend last night, we both agreed, there are never mistakes…but possibly bad choices along the way.  It kinda reinforces that idea I grew up with in church about God having the ultimate will in the outcome of events.  I never knew what that meant, really…but now trucking towards the big 4-0 birthday, I’m spending a ton of time making the pieces to this broken-apart puzzle come back together…and I realize now how much truth there is in that.  Think about it differently, all the recent sales of self-help and self-improvement books, guides, seminars, etc., have done wonders for some, and for others have done very little.  As my counselor likes to remind me every now and then, books are written to sell books.  Why would any one book “work” for one person and not “work” for another?  The answer seems to be coming into more focus for me.  There is an ounce of faith…a positive expectation that things will work out better, that must exist, in my opinion, for any plan to have remotely positive effects.  The secret of success folks, isn’t in a book…it is in you.  Whether you believe in God, Allah, Buddha, or anything else (or nothing of the sort), few can argue that if you go into something believing it’ll be bad, you’ll likely be right.  Few, if any, have been successful without first believing they could do something…that they could be a positive success.

The song is right…we’ll never be the same…and really, who would want to be.  And it’s also right in that the more you change the less you feel…but that is, to me, if you let the change separate you from those feelings.  Sometimes, some feelings need to be locked away and forgotten about forever…or at least for a mighty long time.  But others are good to pull out every now and then, dust off, and relive.  You can actually re-experience a youthfulness you thought had escaped.  Positive connections to the past provide a solid ground to stand on when your emotions are beaten to a pulp.

So in the next sequence of events, while I was scrolling through Shazam and wondering why Smashing Pumpkins wouldn’t sell their stuff to iTunes, I noticed I had acquired a long list of tagged songs that I needed to purchase or delete.  Driving in to work this morning, with a bunch on my mind, one of those downloaded songs came on.  Tim McGraw had a big hit a few years ago “Grown Men Don’t Cry.” Now, you guys know I’m a softie, but this morning it was all I could do to hold it together.  I mean, it was raining, traffic was bad, I’ve got 42 things on my mind hitting all at once, and McGraw has to talk about a mother and son living out of her car, and about a dream he had about where he was a 10-year-old boy holding hands with his dad (that’s tough on me), and then the killer…walking upstairs to put his kids to bed and his daughter looks up and says, “I haven’t had my story yet” and that erases all the stress on his mind…and the little girl lifts her head off the pillow and says, “I love you, dad.”

All I could think of was that little girl of mine playing peg-jump on my iPhone.  She’s 8 now.  And really it’s only a matter of time before she’ll be out on her own.  The urgency of now isn’t about tomorrow, or next week…it is about now.  What are you doing…what am I doing to be assured of success now.

Do me a favor, if you listen to Tonight, Tonight (after enjoying the video of course), turn it around a little and instead of creepy Billy Corgan singing it to you, think about the Higher Power that you believe in singing it to you.  “Believe…believe in me…” – have the faith of a mustard seed, and you can move mountains.

This will be a challenging week for all of us on some level…and not just because of some level of disappointment that seems to always crop up around Valentine’s day…no, we’re all faced with challenges.  But this week, think about it from a different perspective.

Tomorrow will be here soon enough – live today,
Tim

***
Tonight, Tonight – by the Smashing Pumpkins

Time is never time at all
You can never ever leave, without leaving a piece of youth
And our lives are forever changed
We will never be the same
The more you change the less you feel

Believe, believe in me, believe, believe!
That life can change, that you’re not stuck in vain
We’re not the same, we’re different.
Tonight, tonight, tonight
So bright
Tonight, tonight

And you know you’re never sure
But you’re sure you could be right
If you held yourself up to the light
And the embers never fade, in your city by the lake
The place where you were born

Believe, believe in me, believe, believe!
In the resolute urgency of now
And if you believe there’s not a chance tonight
Tonight, tonight, tonight
So bright tonight, tonight!

We’ll crucify the insincere tonight (Tonight)