From the archives… AKA the old folder of photos buried on my server. This gem is circa five years ago. In downtown Bend, there’s a coffee shop called Thump. My wife, our teenager, and I were waiting for our coffee when I looked up. Above me, hanging from the ceiling, were hundreds, likely thousands, of these little wooden placards. There seemed to be a theme: ‘I wish…’
After noticing them above me, I saw dozens of blanks scattered around the shop. It made sense. Think of a wish, write on one of the cards, and it would be immortalized on the ceiling for someone like me to glance up and find. Of the possibly thousands of these wishes, I happened to be under the one that read:
I wish I don’t die with my music still inside me!
Wow. That’s how I felt, then and admittedly still. Over the years, I picked away at my perfectionism to create and sheepishness to share. Recorded some stuff, then ultimately put it ‘out there,’ on The Great Big World Wide Web. It was a big deal for me. A couple of years after stumbling beneath this wish, I came across Todd Henry’s book Die Empty. It's based on the same premise as the person who, like me, doesn’t want to die with their music still inside them. If it's legit to judge a book by how much it's underlined, that one was pretty good. I underlined a lot.
