Lyrics in music - perspective of reality

Most of the time when I listen to music I don't pay much attention to the words. But now and again there will be a line that you hear that paints a clear picture in your mind.

This morning I was driving in to work and I reard a song by Rod Stewart called Love Is. There was a verse that caught my attention.

A day I'm never allowed to forget

There was a girl that I met who I dreamed I would wed

Forever our lives entwined

She said "you gotta stop worrying about the future"

"You know we're far too young for that"

"I wanna spread my wings like a willow in the spring"

I never saw her pretty face again

Specifically the line, you gotta stop worrying about the future.

When I heard this line I started to ask myself is this really true?

I guess Rod, who is twice my age and therefore wiser than I am, wrote this. He's probably got a better perspective of reality than I do. So I shouldn't dismiss this idea straight away.

But I do often wonder is the advice handed out in the media, music lyrics, TV shows, movies etc, is the advice and depiction of reality accurate?

For example if I do completely stop worrying about the future then I will end up only thinking about today. I might have a great time now, but any lack of foresight will probably leave me with nothing tomorrow, much like the prodigal son who took his inheritance and 'wasted his substance with riotous living'.

It is possible to watch TV and see stories depicted of people chasing their dreams, they go through a hard time, but come out victorious having realised their goal. Stories like these are inspiring, but it go back to my question, how much of a reflection of reality are they. Yes, these events worked for one individual, but how many other people are unsuccessful?

I know we are not meant to be on this earth to to be robots or slaves to the system of work to pay for food and shelter for our families, there is more to it than that, but ignoring these responsibilities by thinking only of today will surely see you suffer tomorrow.

I do worry about the future. I suppose I shouldn't, but I should also not stop planning for the future.

I worry that if I loose my job, I will not be able to get another one to pay for the mortgage. I shouldn't worry, I have been fortunate enough to be consistently in work for the last 18 years or so since I started a paper round.

I worry that if I do treat myself and spend a bit of money on 'riotous living', a holiday, an item of clothing or some other want rather than a need, that I won't have enough money to pay the bills. I have always managed to scrape by. I could probably spend a bit more on the fun stuff.

I guess what the lyrics in the song are saying is basically that there are plenty of other fish in the sea. There will be other great opportunities in the future, don't just go for the 1st one that comes your way.

And we can be guilty of this too. You could say 'carpe diem', which is becoming known as seize the day, even if this is not a literal translation. You could say, 'just do it'. You could seize the opportunity because taking chances will make you happy. But you could also say 'let it go' which is a very popular phrase at the moment due to the children's movie Frozen. Let this opportunity pass. There will be others, and there will be better ones.

An example of this might be thinking you have found the perfect item on e-bay or auto trader. Items for sale on these websites come and go all the time. Sometimes I feel like I must have it, I become obsessed with what I have found. I can't stop thinking about it. And then it is gone. I'm not actually that devastated and before too long I have found another perfect item to obsess over.

So what's the point of all my thinking and this blog entery?

I guess, as I have continued to ponder this idea of seizing the opportunity verses letting it go, we need to consider our happiness, we should always do what makes us happy. We shouldn't compromise our future either, so decisions need to be balanced and we need to ask ourselves how frequent these opportunities are likely to come and happy they will make us.

Given the task to review the last 10 years

Recently I was given the task of sending an update of the last 10 years of my life to an old friend. The 1st place I started was writing a small time line. The following is what I came up with.

2005 - got married, graduated, Rachel started her photography business

2006 - started working for Morsons engineering firm, aerospace industry, design, 

2007 - purchased house, started working in Chester

2008 - 

2009 - fitness craze started

2010 - got a new kitten, princess kitty witty

2011 - 3 peaks challenge weekend, called onto bishopric, 

2012 - 

2013 - brought bike from e-bay, now loving cycling again, 

2014 - did a ton of sporting events including 8 hour endurance event and 30+ hour 100k hike, came out about having baby problems, found out we were having a baby, called back onto high council, 

2015 - walked from temple to stake centre, had a baby, raising a baby

Rather worryingly there are huge gaps. Was my life really that empty? I can not think of anything significant to put into some years. I suppose some years will be like that, we won't always have life changing events. It doesn't mean we haven't had a good time. We've been on holidays, we've toured the UK, we've spent time with family and friends, we've made lots of memories.

The exercise prompted me to retrieve our archived annual photos and put them on our home server. This makes them more accessible and I have since reviewed many forgotten memories.

You may be interested to know what I ended up writing to my friends. Here is my update to them.

We had a think about what you would want to know. The 1st thing you would probably want to know is that we are both still married and active in the church. Since 2005 I have served as EQP in Stretford, served on the high council, as a member of the bishopric and I am now back on the high council. Rachel has also served at stake level in primary & young women's. She is currently teaching youth Sunday school.

Shortly after our wedding in July 2005 in September 2005 Rachel started her own business and started taking photos for a craft magazine. And by January 2006 I was working for an engineering firm in the Aerospace industry.

We celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary the other day. It was an anniversary unlike any other we had experienced before. Previously we have gone away for the weekend, gone on a grand day out or maybe even a restaurant. This year was quite different. This year, were exhausted, we got a take away and watched over our little boy.

After quite a few years of no success and a lot of emotional turmoil in 2014 Rachel finally made our situation public by announcing a fundraising activity we would do to support an infertility charity. We hiked round an entire county, the Isle of Wight, 106km in 30 hours. It was a relief to finally be open about something that most people kinda knew already, but didn't talk to us about. Shortly after the hike we went to the hospital to start IVF treatment. All we had to left to do was call the hospital at the right time of month to start with all the drugs and stuff that's involved. Well, that time of month never came.

Let's say, miraculously, after all the training and big hike, and after having no hope, we discovered that Rachel was finally pregnant.

Troy was born May 17th 2015. We don't need to go into detail about how dependant they are and how tired we have been feeling, I'm sure you are familiar with that. We are very delighted he is here. We love him to bits.

We've put together a time line of the last 10 years so you can see some of the significant events. Rather worryingly, some years are complete blanks to me. 1 because photos are not easily accessible of these times of our life, making it hard to review. 2 because we probably were just coasting through life.

I had been quite used to saying to people that I was just plodding along. Everything was constant. It has not been particularly easy, but it's not been massively hard either. It's just been constant. We have had good times and made memories together. We have had holidays, we have even made it to Salt Lake City in 2008. We bumped into the missionaries in China Town in NY NY in 2006/2007 and we have met missionaries in Bangor, North Wales.

Some of our more recent adventures include the great outdoors. Climbing Mt Snowdon numerous times and then extending our hiking repertoire around the country. I'm not sure when we decided to climb Mt Snowdon for the 1st time, maybe 2009, but since then we have embraced the outdoor environment and not just enjoyed climbing but other forms of fitness. Mainly running but also cycling. We have entered many running events over the last 3-4 years (all on a Saturday) and the best ones we have done have been the muddy runs. People think we are crazy, but trail running is so much more interesting than running on the road or on the treadmill.

The only other things worth a little mention is that we purchased a house in Urmston, Manchester, in 2007. Bad timing, but we brought it intending to stay, so the fact that it has depreciated in value isn't too much of a concern. We moved Rachel's cats, Lucky, from her Mums house into our place shortly after we moved in. She stayed with us for 3 years before she died. Then about 6 months after that (mid 2010), we got what we thought was a lovely little kitten. I named her Princess Kitty Witty. Turns out Princess is actually quite nasty. She tolerates us but does not like anybody else. Since Troy arrived she has kept her distance and might be suffering from a bit of depression as we turn our attention away from her. She'll be okay.

That's about it. It's incredible to think that a decade ago we just coming out of the student phase of our lives into responsible adulthood. We had many great times as YSA & have fond memories of these defining years.

In 2014 I grew a beard.

We both love Thai food.

We also included some photos. These are just a couple of 100's I could have chosen.

This was our Christmas photo of 2014

This was us on our epic 106km hike. I'll write more about this in another post.

The three of us the the Preston Temple. Troy's 1st visit.

Rachel with her cat Lucky

This was us completing our 1st official mud run (Hell Run) in 2013. That was a fun day.

Myself and our cat Princess Kitty Witty.

Just the two of us at a friends wedding. The friend was our matchmaker & chief bridesmaid Zoe.

The three of us at Troy's blessing and our 10 year anniversary weekend.

This is how we spent the evening of our 10 year anniversary.

Election time

I try to vote for the party that supports 'the family' in general, not necessarily my family.

They say you shouldn't talk about politics for a reason. However, when election time comes around, it is kinda forced on you. This year was the 1st year that Facebook really saw a lot of action with people posting links to articles and personal views regularly.

I'm all for people haveing an opinion and a voice. What I don't support is people being offensive with their voice (in this case in written form). You can say what needs to be said without offending others. You could say, so what if you find my comments offensive, what's the worst that can happen. And sometime there are people out there looking to be offended and will take offence as non-offensive comments. But we should all seek to be good to avoid alienating either ourselves or others.

Many of my friends on Facebook are Christian. We try to follow the example of Christ. He would not go round deliberately offending others. Sadly, many of my friends forgot this. It made me sad.

I personally don't tend to comment of the politics but I did make a point of commenting on people's behaviour in the hope of reminding my Facebook friends that name calling and mud slinging is not the lords way.

Below are a couple of examples.

My 1st comment was put up on 30th March, some time before the hype had really got going. I thought the message was clear.

I'm always disgusted by the parties that do things like hire billboard space to say something like "don't for them because..." Rather than "vote for us because..."

The problem is they are all doing it. So there isn't a single good, moral party out there.

The next comment was in reply to a long string of comments, many people were getting offended and I was trying to keep the peace.

And finally, right at election time. I couldn't hold my tongue any longer. I was getting really frustrated with some stupid comments and behaviour.

The irony, despite being quite bold here, in asking people to stop persecuting and name calling, a couple of individuals who liked my comment, then went on to continue to post heavily biased articles of Facebook.

Some people just don't get the message. Which then makes me question their skills of rationalisation and subsequently question the validity of their political opinions.

Living

Yesterday I watched a video about a young man cyclingacross the Sahara desert. One of the things he says near the beginning of the video is that it is when you put yourself in situations like these that you really feel alive.

http://youtu.be/XugFGQdW1Hc

Also in the news yesterday, was lots of press about the annual Perseid meteor shower. While going out at night to view a meteor shower in significantly less dangerous than riding a bike across the Sahara desert, it was an opportunity to seize the moment and just do it.

So that is what I did. I discussed with Rachel, if she wanted to come where we might go to get some good views. We found a spot in Boothstown on a bridge over the canal. We were there just a few moments and we saw our 1st 'shooting star'. I wanted to capture an image of one but as we were looking east from the west side of Manchester there was a lot of light pollution. So I dropped my wife and little boy back home at about 2am and this time alone dashed out into the Peak District. There was a car park I was recently introduced to with a short walk to a small hill which would have given a great view of the night sky.

Again, it didn't take long to spot a little meteorite or two. But I wanted a picture. I set up the tripod, pointed the camera up, played with the settings and kept hitting the shutter button. The pictures were 30 second exposures and the meteorites when you did see them were very bright. Brighter than the stars. But they were very brief. Like a tiny spark in the sky. So given the short nature of the meteorite, it was hit an miss as to whether I would capture one. You can't predict these things either. They hit the atmosphere at random times and appear in random parts of the sky. So it was just a case of keep taking photos and hope that one shows up while the sensor is open.

After an hour, the exhilarating feeling was leaving me. I was starting to get cold and I was confident I hadn't snapped a meteorite.

I arrived home about 4:30am, but before I could go to bed, I had to upload the pictures from the memory card to the computer to review and see if I had snapped one or not.

Given how long the exposures were it is easy to put some visible features in some of the pictures down to environmental factors. But towards the end of my batch I found the following image. I've added another image looking at the same spot of the sky for comparison. You can see a streak just to the right of the center of the image just below a distinctively yellow star (or galixy, possibly Andromeda).

Was it worth it. Ask my wife and I and you will probably get different answers. I'm feeling very tired today after just a few hours sleep. But I am defiantly pleased I went out and did something out of the ordinary, something rather cool, and maybe crazy too, even if I didn't get the stunning image I was hoping for. I did still get some great pictures of the stars and I will always remember this night.

I should sign off this post by expressing gratitude. I'm grateful that I had the means and the health to do this. With no job, I probably could not afford a car to find a suitable spot to star gaze. Without previous experience in the pennine hills, I wouldn't have been able to go where I ended up. Without a passion for hiking I wouldn't have considered the little ascent to my final spot and obviously without my health I wouldn't have made it up the hill either. Without the type of job I have I wouldn't have been able to come into work so late today and without a photographer for a wife, I probably wouldn't have the camera to capture the images and the post processing know how to tweak them and get the most out of them.

Back to Blogging.

Its been about 5 years since I opened my blog. It's a shame that it has been so long. But the social media world and the way society now interacts with one another has changed massively in those 5 years. The main reason for the change and move away from a personal blog has been Facebook. It's easy to share views or goings on and it's easy to follow friends and see what they are up to too.

However, of late I have flet that there is extremely little of value left on there. More and more adverts are appearing and utterly pointless articles with no foundation or substance are being recommended in my feed. I have found myself reading rubbish.

With the recent birth of my son Troy, I decided I would keep an online diary for him. A blog. Documenting various things that have been going on for him to one day review.

Whilst I get into the habit of writing for him. I may as well get into the habit of writing for me too.

This space was supposed to be a place where I would express my opinion and share some of the good and bad times of my life.

This is what I intend to do again.