I feel like I see more acutely than ever into the backing track of human experience. There is the "outside" of how our lives are going within givens and events, but then there is the "backing track" -- the enabling part, the staying part, the... well, the (kind of) Eternal Part. The two parts, the outside and the backing track, are separate.

"Phosphorus" is a word one sometimes uses for this, but listening to an old Beach Boys song from 1973 brought it home so beautifully. You hear a number of "stanzas", and then (at least twice, maybe three times) a keyboard-driven bridge -- a melody that puts you right through the roof emotionally. It summons almost automatically the mood you'd want to have surrounding you when you are dying.

Moreover, the voiced imperative at the end, "Sail on, sail on, sailor", is exactly what I need. I don't need someone to help me find 'new purpose', something to plant me in the now again, when my spirits are low. I need, as Meister Eckhart wrote in 1312, to experience the following: "If you are looking for God, go back to where you lost Him."

To put that in slightly more horizontal terms -- tho' even its horizontal transcription is really Vertical -- "If you are looking for who you are meant to be, go back to where you really were yourself". Incidentally, that was probably not in connection with your career or your cause. It was more likely in connection with a certain someone.

People sometimes think I'm overdoing it when I underline the centrality of romantic connection in life. I don't believe I am. The main reason one underlines that dimension is, well, ... popular music. It's not news to anyone reading this, that 97.5% of all rock songs, from the very beginning (i.e., Elvis and Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry and Link Wray and Joe Meek), concern romantic love. Not 65% or even 85%, but 97.5%. Think about that. I mean, really, let that sink in.

Anyway, if you want to find God (i.e., your way forward, as opposed to your way backward -- to inertia, bitterness, and cascading negativity as the years go on), go back to... the song you remember from that time you first came out of yourself. Whether the person you were with when you first heard that song is alive or dead, present or out there (Moody Blues, 1988), that moment is eternal. It is still present. It is still your empirical guide to...

Podcast 406 is dedicated to Sam Everette.