Lives of quiet desperation
“Most people live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with their song still in them”
Last night I watched the incredibly thought provoking film Revolutionary Road and I was reminded of this quote. It's this hopeless emptiness that is portrayed in the film, and it's done so with the same raw emotion and sense of desperation that so many of us have felt at some time in our lives.
It doesn’t always take a huge life event to feel this way. Sometimes you just get up in the morning and nothing is wrong but nothing is particularly right either.
As Barry Manilow sings:-
"I'm doing okay, but not very well.
No jolts, no surprises, no crisis arises,
my life goes along as it should,
it's all very nice but not very good"
The best thing to do when these feelings hit is to take a moment to ask yourself what’s really going on, because it's in these times of quiet evaluation and introspection that change usually happens.
So, ask yourself, what do you need to do to start singing? Even in your darkest moments, what would motivate you to get up and keep going, keep moving forward one step at a time?
To look ahead, because as George Burns once said, "I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life".
