Category: Thoughts

By on

Around about this time of year with Christmas coming up and the New Year just around the corner, I always start looking back on the year that was and contemplate on what has happened to me on a personal level and life in general.

One of the ways that I do this is to go through my old blog posts to gain some inspiration (and who knows, there might be a song idea or two waiting to be uncovered).

While going through my earlier posts I came across something I wrote called  Life – We’re Making It Up As We Go Along and from it I glimpsed an undeniable truth that which no-one can escape from.

And that truth is that sometimes life just happens and there’s nothing you can do about it.

No matter how much I try and control the outcomes of my life there is always a small percentage of it that wants to be random, chaotic and spontaneous. The funny thing is that the more I try to fight and control this random, chaotic and spontaneous nature of my life, the more persistent it becomes.

It has made me realise that randomness, chaos and spontaneity truly shapes how my life unfolds on a daily basis and any semblance of control I think I have in my life is merely an illusion.

I’m sure this is what John Lennon meant when he wrote the lyric “life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans”

Ah… I understand now. Now to find that song idea.

Peace,

Corey 🙂

By on 1 Comment

Apparently Socrates once said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” What did he mean by this?

For me, the above statement is about mindfulness and how it can transform a life of mindless automation into one of purposeful self-reflection and forward momentum.

Recently, I’ve become acutely aware that the unexamined life is a life not worth living and right at this very moment my life is something that I want to actively reflecting on and be mindful of, rather than allow to cruise on auto-pilot.

This is something I want to do because…

  • I want to slow down, simplify things and “smell the roses”
  • I want to regain some sort of work/life/creativity balance for myself
  • I want to have a more calm and stress-free life
  • I want to become a better songwriter through active self-reflection
  • I don’t want to remember my life as being a beige coloured blur

In my earlier post titled My Break From Live Performance – Eight Months In, I mentioned that one of the things I rediscovered during my break was a personal path which was primarily focussed on the study of Buddhist teachings (without the religious connotations), meditation and mindfulness.

It was the mindfulness component of this path that lead me to the realise the consequences of an unexamined life and it’s the reason this post exists… As a reinforcement of that fact.

Personally, one of the best ways I can think of to examine and mindfully contemplate my life is to write about it either privately in my journal or, publicly through this blog.

Musically, as a songwriter and musician, I feel that the most important thing I could be doing for my craft is writing, listening, contemplating, daydreaming and generally being aware of my thoughts, feelings and how I interact with my surroundings.

Writing does that for me. When I don’t write, life becomes really hard.

This path of mindful self-reflection is not going to be an easy one to take as I’ve been living in cruise mode for quite a while, but it’s a path that I must walk if I’m going to be the person I want to be for me, my wife, my family, my friends, my work and for my music because it’s all intertwined and interconnected with one another.

No matter who we are or what we do in our lives, we all want to become the person we want to be and for me writing and self reflection is the way to get there..

As far as I’m concerned, Socrates was right on so many levels.

Peace,

Corey 🙂

By on 3 Comments

You know, as I get on with the day to day business that is my life, I’m realising more and more that for most of the time we are all making up our lives as we go along which to a recovering control freak like myself, comes as a great relief.

Yes, that’s right, a recovering control freak.

Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I love to be in control, even though that I knew intellectually that the notion of control is but only an illusion.

Feeling in control has made me feel safe and secure with the world around me and the upside of this feeling is that I consider myself a very organised and punctual person.

The downside to always wanting to be in control is that I would almost always get highly stressed out when situations don’t go according to the pre-determined plan that I have in my own head.

I’d get so stressed it would at times paralyse me.

I really loathe this feeling of being out of control but I didn’t really know how I could rectify this, a pattern that has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

The realisation that we’re all making our lives up as we go along eliminates the need for me to compare my life with the life of others around me and therefore disengage myself from this need to be in control all the time.

Yes, I know that some people have their lives together more than others and I also know that we’re all unique in our own abilities, our history and the way we look at the world around us, but deep down we all want the same things, such as love, respect, validation, acknowledgement, recognition and happiness

When I look at life in this way I realise deep down we are all in the same boat.

Right now I’m working on creating some sort of balance between my need to have everything in my life catalogued and in its place and at the same time, being totally spontaneous.

Quite a challenge when it think about it but not an impossible thing for me to achieve.

I reckon there’s a song in this…

Peace,

Corey 🙂