“…for every seed must die before it grows”

A box of chocolates…

Forrest Gump wasn’t wrong when he said his famous phrase, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get”.

I have another thought though:

Life is like a chord progression.

This needs a bit of background and clarification. Last Friday night my band carcrasheyes played a show at Maxwell’s Music House in Waterloo. Cool place, cool people, cool vibe. I had fun. We played alongside a Windosr based band called Michou - they were fantastic. I must admit that occasionally after playing a show, I don’t have a strong desire to stick around. My ADHD kicks in and I get antsy. But since it was somewhat of a shorter night, I stuck around and I’m so glad I did. Their music was beautiful and for the first time in a long time I simply sat there and watched them play from beginning to end. It helped that they had varying instrumentation and really kept things interesting.

There was a moment for me that stood out to me. I couldn’t tell you which song, or which part, but I heard a progression that caught me off guard. The first chord came along and it sounded pleseant. The next few chords took the listeners on a journey that wasn’t exactly pretty, but by the last chord in the progression a light-bulb went through my ears and into my head and I thought, “Aha! It all makes sense now!”. Those ugly chords were crucial, pivotal, necessary. The progression would not have made sense without them. And it turned the piece as a whole into something beautiful to me.

You can likely see where I’m heading with this.

Life is indeed like a chord progression. This goes for a life as a whole or in part. How many times have we reflected on hard moments in life and all of a suddent said something like my “Aha” moment?

Let me stop speaking on behalf of people and speak to you, the reader (I know you’re out there, lurkers. I can see my WordPress stats on blog days! Whether or not you care, that’s another story. Heh).

I don’t know your story, or at least not all of it. Maybe your life has been filled with troubles and hardships, one after the other. I wonder if at some point before you pass away, you’ll have an “Aha” moment. In that moment, all the struggles and pain won’t seem so ruthless and horrific. Instead of greiving over these pains, you’ll finally see it as a beautiful piece of the puzzle. Maybe you’ll simply see the ugly things as necessary, or even good.

Let me prod further. Imagine for a moment that you are a supreme being. You can see all that ever was, all that is, and all that will be. You see all the hurting, pain, and hopelessness. You hear people’s cries, and it breaks your heart. With every inch of your being you want to do something (and you can), but as a good, holy being, knowing full well the grander scheme – the bigger picture – it would be disastrously wrong to interject.

In our moments where we see or experience the most ugly the world has to offer, we ask ourselves, or God, “How could this happen?”. It seems impossible for there to be a big picture – But there most always is. It may take 5 months, 5 years, 50 years, or 500 years, but eventually our eyes will be unveiled to the beautiful but ugly, sour but sweet, wrong but right.

Some of the most touching stories I have ever heard are from people who have battled cancer. Cancer is a terrible thing that I would not wish upon anyone. Yet whether lost or won, beauty can blossom from something so wretched. We may never say, “Cancer is beautiful”, as it most certainly is not. But once we are removed from the it all, we may find the strength to recognize that during the ordeal, we reconciled with family members, re-connected with our creator, or discovered this hidden strength within ourselves. These are all beautiful things, though it still may end ugly – this is a sad reality.

In the end, good will prevail over evil, for evil is merely the absence of the good, just as darkness is merely the absence of light.

So let’s bring on the light, friends.

How are you going to lighten the world around you?
Have you reflected and contemplated on the uglier parts of your chord progression? Have you experienced an “Aha”? If you haven’t,  search your soul and mind, you just might find it.

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