The fragments began to sound like music.
SUN
Something happened today.
I was listening to Fool’s Overture by Supertramp. I have loved music for much of my life, and one of the things that fascinates me about that piece is that it feels so large and deliberate.
Then there is the wonderful irony that Roger Hodgson did not apparently begin with some grand unified philosophical plan. The piece grew from fragments, ideas, musical sections accumulated over time. A hodgepodge. That delighted me. Because human beings are pattern-making creatures.
We hear the whole and feel meaning, even when the pieces were not originally assembled under one master plan. And suddenly the song became a metaphor for a life. My life was not designed as a coherent narrative either. Depression. Businesses. Photography. Music. Marriage. Family. Mistakes. Trying to help people.
Projects that worked. Projects that failed. Driving taxis. Delivering food. Standing on boats. Writing software. Asking questions that occasionally annoyed everyone in the vicinity. If you had handed those fragments to the twenty-year-old version of me, he would not have seen a theme.
He would have seen a pile. But meaning can emerge from accumulation. A life can be experienced from the inside as unfinished pieces and later heard, from a little distance, as something closer to an overture. That does not mean everything happened for a reason.
I am wary of that phrase. Some things happened because people made bad choices. Some happened because bodies fail. Some because systems are unfair. Some because weather does not consult us. Some because life contains chance. Meaning does not require us to pretend the fragments were planned. Meaning can be what happens when we listen to them together.
