by grace we enter transformation

"Up, down, turn around; Please don't let me hit the ground; Tonight I think I'll walk alone; I'll find my soul as I go home"

Trainspotting was released in 1996, almost 20 years ago. I watched it alone at the Elmwood Theater on College Ave. in Berkeley when I was 19. Before the film I was driving around alone in a blue 1989 Nissan Sentra, crawling out my skin, desperately craving something different. In the film I found what I was looking for. A bizarre European indie film about heroin addiction, sex, teenage angst, violence, being Scottish--all things I strangely/not strangely related to. I loved the music. Songs from New Order, Underworld, Brian Eno, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop. I wanted to live in this music, foreign to me.

Today, I'm struggling in my professional life. I'm 37. I started a music business by myself two years ago. But lately I've become lost in relation to this work. I work three days a week at a nonprofit with first generation college students. I'm a career coach. I love this work, I love the students I work with, I'm grateful for the opportunity, humbled, and constantly learning from the students. But when you add up the pieces of my professional life, you get a number below 10, a number that is fuzzy, incomprehensible at the moment.

There are so many wonderful people and things in my life. I'm profoundly lucky to be married to a woman who is luminous, serene and grounded. We have a little boy. What a joy to have this little boy and his waves of feeling.

But in relation to my professional life I'm still that 19 year old crawling out his skin, confused. I dive back into New Order's "Temptation" and am transported.

I'm reminded that what's important is not what I've accomplished professionally. The goal is to simply live and let the judgements of good person/bad person, successful person/unsuccessful person dissolve. I'm alive, in this moment, living out energy, and soaking in energy.

If by grace we enter transformation, then the grace is the music, friends and family that allow me to transform my perspective. In this moment, just this moment, I'm no longer a slave to the ego concept, self-judgements of good/bad, successful/unsuccessful.

"oh you've got green eyes, oh you've got blue eyes, oh you've got grey eyes"

and they are all beautiful, so said the Lord,
Anthony