So I’ve been moving this weekend and as always it’s a big job and it sucks. But in fact I’m getting away from a neighbor who plays electronic dance music sixteen hours a day so I’m pretty happy about it. It’s a bigger apartment, moving from a studio to a one bedroom, I gain an extra 100 square feet, a dishwasher and a balcony and a nice little rent increase, nothing is perfect, except a Pizza Pit pizza and you can no longer get one of those.

So just a quick post this week, I was making a trip to Walmart to pick up a few things for the apartment. Since Walmart is banned in our county, although our county is fine with having there online ordering headquarters here, it’s about a 40 minute drive to the store. I figured the round trip total time matched up pretty well with the full duration of Pink Floyd’s, The Wall so I decided to crank it up and listen on the trip. My favorite song on the album, although I literally love every song on that album, is Comfortably Numb. The line in the quote at the top of the post is the lyric that resonates the most with me.

Before I became a Pink Floyd fan, back during the The Wall tour, a friend offered me a ticket to see the The Wall performance in NYC with him and his older brother. I passed, something that haunts me to this day. And I spent over a decade trying to rectify that mistake and catch Pink Floyd live, but Roger Waters left the group and honestly to me, Pink Floyd isn’t really Pink Floyd without Waters AND Gilmour. However, I was able to catch David Gilmour on a solo tour at the Saratoga Performance Art Center in upstate New York. To my great joy near the end of the show I heard the first notes of Comfortably Numb and I was thrilled to get to watch Gilmour perform it. And this is what I always remember from that night and it’s a great concert memory for me.

As I was standing there I caught some motion out of the corner of my eye, and as the big guitar solo fired up I had the experience of watching David Gilmour play my favorite solo, while watching this other guy air guitar it next to me. Gilmour, a consummate professional musician who had played this solo untold number of times, was calm and controlled and perfect. The guy next to me was flailing around like some kind of epileptic musician playing while having a grand mal seizure. In the moment, I almost said to him dude, look at the stage, but he was as deep in his air guitar bliss as I was watching Gilmour so I let him go unbothered.

It was an important lesson. You see, what’s important is that people are happy, that they enjoy themselves. That’s likely to look very different for different people and that’s ok. You see, at a concert I like to sit quietly and enjoy the experience that the performers provide, others need to jump up and down and sing along. Neither way is wrong, it’s just a matter of doing what brings you the most joy. The epitome of the different strokes for different folks cliche.

For those of you who don’t know the song or now just need to here it, here is,Comfortably Numb.

So remember, to bring joy and happiness into your life do what brings you that joy, not what brings others joy, be good with that and have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane