What's been burbling up to the surface for you? What's the burning idea or project whose time has come? A new spring has sprung; summer is here: the long winter has passed and the time is now right to launch the thing you might have been too depressed to even consider a few months from now.
Margaret Atwood knows a thing or two about dystopian futures. Near what I hope is the tail end of the last two dystopian-like decades, I am hoping we are all moving up and through. In her masterwork, "the Handmaid's Tale", the lead character awakens from the dazed stupor of a severe military attack to a cover of Coldplay's classic. Music and theatrical drama often come together to define such poignant moments and this one marked for me the start of the next stage of life.
I have had the good fortune of seeing Chris Martin's Coldplay several times, once in a vast stadium. They had no problem filling the space, either with people or their energy. When the time came for that song, the famously frenetic front man, opened up the stage to the entire audience to join him, not just in singing the chorus at a level drowning out the band, but many of the verses as well. If you have not seen the near-evangelical force-of-nature that is Chris Martin (and his audience), it's well worth the break in your day to witness this marvel taking place at a live concert in São Paulo.
This song is the anthem for my rebirth.
Like many of you I suspect, I have been wandering around for the past few years in my own near-dazed stupour. During my turn as the so-called "generation-in-charge", I've lived through the crash of the dot-com bubble, the attacks on the twin towers (and the subsequent and sometimes futile war on terror), the financial meltdown and Great Recession, the death of a few close friends scattered about, the probably-inevitable collapse of the primary industry in my province (in dire need but in continual denial of pipelines) and then finally the pandemic that world governments headed into unprepared despite the almost seditious warnings of a league of scientists and health professionals. Such are the cycles of the human condition. I do not begrudge them, but I am done with them.
As a creative entrepreneurial person with a gutteral desire to make an impact, it's both hard and deeply moving to watch an audience react with such electric fervor to the writer and performer of a creative work product. If you want to see what visceral audience engagement looks like–and the impact that a small group of people can generate–take your cue from Chris (as I now like to call him). You might favour other bands with similar powers of elevation but this one is the one that sets the bar for me.
I have listened to other covers of Fix You, including one from Sam Smith. Maybe they are all just hoping to catch even a small glimmer of the waves of a new era coming in to shore. May we all experience even a small sliver of enthusiatic fans. Go forth. Rock what you have to rock. Lights will guide you home.
The way to fix you is to launch you.
(cover photocredit: iamfearlesssoul.com)