Seasons of Life

And the shifting outfits of identity

The slap I received from the Muses today will be again brought to you from a place of heavy metal madness. (Album of choice: Soilwork - Steelbath Suicide)

Why heavy metal; and what positive influence can a violent, aggressive, and brutal genre bring to one’s writing process?

Presently, it’s a matter of practicality. When the environment is filled with the cacophonous screeching of angle grinders over a bassline of concrete drills, with various other construction-related melodical overtones, there ain’t much better at putting them in the background.

This doesn’t change the environment, but it adds an artistic layer of aggression and destruction to it. Rather than feeling aggression and violence in response to the countless machines ripping into actual heavy metals, I am content listening to humans using instruments which sound like they are ripping into heavy metal.

Music is hugely influential to our moods. I can understand my mood and state of mind by what music I am gravitating towards, just as easily as I can use musical selection to create the mood and state of mind I desire.

In Germany a lot of my time was spent listening to the Deutsch Rap Aggressiv playlist. Beyond simply being educational, it reflected how I felt. I was resisting the German (and the pandemic) machine by funneling all of my Spotify royalties into the pockets of asozial gangster rappers.

If rap represents resistance, then heavy metal represents the depths of an intense change cycle. If heavy metal had a gravitational force, it would be, well, heavy. As for death metal, it’s the most powerful force of change that we face - death.

What does it look like in the depths of an intense change cycle?

Yesterday I saddled up the donkey and rode into the sunset without a plan. (It was morning, and it was my scooter. But don’t let the truth interrupt a nice sentence!) This took me to a restaurant where I enjoyed ‘rice noodles with crab patty in sour crap soup’ (one job, guys, one job!), which was unexpected and enjoyable. Where it didn’t take me was a coffee shop.

Because you can get it everywhere (in my experience), and because it’s been given the societal green light, it’s easy to forget that coffee is a powerful drug. And all drugs can be addictive, and dependency can form.

It was business as usual until about 15:30. The whispers of the familiar caffeine-deprivation headache descended, and by 16:30 it was debilitating.

You can know something in three different ways:

1. You know something because someone told you it is so

2. You know something because you thought about it and determined it to be so

3. You know something because you experienced it directly.

At about 17:00 my knowledge was right in that third realm. I knew, directly, that the human could become physically dependent on coffee, and I was that human.

My life is undergoing a rapid process of change, and death metal is accompanying me, and this is a small real-world example of it.

I fight it for a while (rap), then accept that it’s changing (death metal), before sitting in non-action and overwhelm (black metal), then I embrace it (progressive metal and everything psychedelic) and, finally, I come to happy acceptance (all the other beautiful genres of music that I love to fill my days with, and silence).

Every state is different. They have different flavours, defining characteristics, and personalities. Under threat of execution, I’d be hard pressed to tell you which is my favourite. They all contain intensity, beauty, and an aliveness that can only be described as human.

If you’ve been reading these emails for a while, you’ll know my gripes with ‘identity’. There’s a permanence and immutability in how people think about it. I think it’s madness.

We do things for a time, wearing roles, behaviours, and characteristics like clothes, but eventually the climate of our Life Seasons change and our roles, behaviours, and characteristics must change with them. Nobody wants to wear the jacket of their winter Life Season when summer rolls around.

‘What am I?’ or ‘Who am I?’: The Million Dollar Questions.

If I don’t know what or who I am, I don’t know how to behave, so I look for an answer and the form of that answer is often ‘I am a…’

You are a what? How long has it been true? Will you be it forever? Is it OK for you not to be a…? How much of how you show up in the world is built around your identification with this ‘a…’ that you claim to be?

I wear my musical moods and my seasons of life like the clothes in my wardrobe. They need to be changed and washed, sometimes they don’t fit any more, and occasionally they need to be disposed of.

When held too tightly, identity ceases being positive and starts being negative. ‘But this is how I’ve always been! How can I change it? What will people think of me? I better just keep on down this path, because it’s too hard to change’. This is equivalent to living my life in a perpetual state of rap music, never allowing myself the space to indulge in death metal, or classical music, or country. It might look like I’m living a rich life, but there is an internal deadening resulting from my refusal to change with my nature.

This piece is a perfect example of change in action. How did I get here? I have no idea, but I’m following the thread, it remains uninterrupted, and it’s connecting the past two weeks of my life to right now. And it feels so alive.

Which is the counterpoint to the dead sense of identity: aliveness. A dear friend of mine, Ariane, wrote about this in her most recent piece and she nails it, as usual.

" When I was in the middle of my doctoral research, interviewing high school juniors over a period of months, I was struck by one, consistent observation: their aliveness.

Individually, and in a group, these teens radiated a passionate, inexhaustible enthusiasm for life. Their irrepressible aliveness sharpened the edges of any mood: angry, depressed, excited, curious, frustrated or elated.

These teens seemed inexorably wired for experiencing the thrill of each moment no matter its tone or color, no matter dark or light, no matter sunshine or storm, and especially no matter adult approval or not.

It was as if aliveness flowed, unimpeded, from the core of their being."

‘Angry, depressed, excited, curious, frustrated or elated’, and still, through all these different outfits of identity ‘aliveness flowed, unimpeded, from the core of their being’.

This aliveness leads me to break patterns, often spontaneously, and seemingly without reason, headaches be damned. But there’s always a hidden reason that flows from the core of my being, whether I’m conscious of it or not.

Finally, I’m left asking ‘how to put a ribbon on this piece?’ It is an unfolding, non-linear, micro representation of life and reality. If I can see the macro in the micro of my musical habits, can you find the macro in the micro of this piece that doesn’t end with an answer, but instead with a question?

Am I?