Another Morning

So my ego got shot down first thing in the morning. Twice. I've been through quite a lot, I think, but it wasn't until this morning that I found out that it's possible to punch someone in the face with words alone, and that it takes the most vulnerable of people to do such a thing. Very few things are more powerful than vulnerable people with scars from their pasts opening themselves up to reveal those scars. More powerful still is when those people tell you how they made the decision not to follow suit with what the handicap carrying. When they say no I'm not going down with this, you know you're facing people with higher powers. So much like you, yet so far different.

And it's an entirely different story when you are forced to admit that you've had some stuffs in the wrong priority. I had to swallow my ego and admitted that yes my drumming has been all about me. When it comes down to it, with all the pretty words and logical language are stripped away, my drumming life revolves around me. I do it because I enjoy it, I do it hoping that I'm gonna look cool while doing it. Little did I realize that it can't go on like that. Still I am human. To the day I die I will always revel in those things. I will still enjoy playing drums either way, and I may or may not look cool at it. But point is, that can't be what it's all about. Life is too vast, the world too important, and time too short to live my life with me both as its means and its end. People are too important to be hearing only my drumming played for the sake of me alone. I had no idea what I was dealing with. I still don't. I only know now that I didn't know before.

But the good news is that I can still do it. I can't help people myself, but I can still do what I can. My drumming ain't gonna impress nobody, but I sure as heck can practice.

Yesterday's opening struck me for its inclusiveness. It seemed to me to opened its arms wide, as if it's calling everything and everybody to come together as one. The young and the old; the modern and the traditional; the cultural and the steel; the didgeridoo and the drums; the insiders and the outcasts; the good and the bad; the Gundams and the Zakus, everybody. Any other day I'd say, you gotta be crazy. But today it began to make sense. It's true, it's a crazy endeavour. It's true, it's beyond my reach. But that's great, because if it's within my reach then I'll spoil it again by making it to be about me all over again.

That's about all I can say about today, Hillsongs Con 09 Day Two. Something else I can say about this city, though, is how it sticks to my mind. Maybe more than its skyscrapers and its pillars of steel and glass, glimpses of its suburbs got stuck in my mind. Small narrow houses, some fallen into disrepair, the abandoned brick buildings, the old shops and the empty streets, dark and wet under the winter rain. Maybe it sticks so stubbornly in my head because it's a part of a bigger picture. The eye of the storm is the calmest spot. It is where it breeds the destruction that it wrecks on its outside arms. The glamour of the central city, did it cause the suburbs to get so depressing? Or were the suburbs the sacrificial slaves for the empowerment of the city? I'll never know, but I know this: If I'll ever live in this town, I'm gonna fight tooth and nail to live in the central city.