Collaborations.

What happens when a few musical geniuses get in a recording studio to make music? A thing of beauty.

The Goat Rodeo Sessions, a collaborative work between Yo-yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile, is a mingling of classical, folk, and bluegrass styles. It is lovely and great reading music - as  most of it is instrumental. Two of the songs do have vocals, which brings me to the reason for today's post.

The whole CD is terrific, but I've been a wee bit manic about one song in particular: Here & Heaven. Beautiful harmonies set to a cello, fiddle, and banjo — need I say more?

Not all those who wander are lost.

Okay, so I wasn't lost in the Tolkien sort of way, I was actually following my GPS. But hear me out.

This past weekend I did myself a favor and headed north. Just some time to get lost in the woods, or something like that. I was traveling to a familiar part of Minnesota, but still needed help getting there. I punched the address into the GPS and off I went. I thought I knew which roads would take me to my destination. I'm happy to report there was a better way.

The usual route, well it's a bit boring. This new path, oh it was beautiful. There were twists and turns, roads lined with forest, quiet country ways with only one lane in each direction. The newness of it was charming.

It was like I was a modern-day cowboy - driving off into the sunset, with the city behind me and no schedule before. Except I was driving a Pontiac and am clearly not a boy. Well, maybe if John Wayne was 24 and a woman and living in 2011...let's be honest here, it really wasn't that epic or romantic. In fact it was just, pleasant. It was a pleasant three hour drive north, but with a few hidden gems waiting to be found along the way. I didn't need to know my route, my only job: enjoy the ride.

The other side of the coin: hope.

This week it is the other side of the coin of last week's post. On this subject matter I am merely an observer, so I'm going to let someone else say it better: Read this article (from the Wall Street Journal) on the life and death of Steve Jobs. Thought provoking stuff. (I found it through this blog)

Your technology doesn't just change the method that you communicate, it changes what you talk about and how you do it. Not only that, but technology also shapes our society and culture. So, whoever is shaping our culture and technology is shaping your world in someway, whether you know it or not. Steve Jobs wasn't the master of the universe - clearly - but he was one of the idea leaders of our day, so understanding his ideas (and the many other thought leaders that are vying for space in our lives) actually matters. 

I'm not an expert on Steve Jobs, the author of this article likely isn't either, but it will get your thoughts turning at a minimum. One of the more powerful sections was a comparison of Jobs's Stanford commencement speech (see last week's post) and a Martin Luther King Jr. speech:

"Mr. Jobs's final leave of absence was announced this year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And, as it happened, Mr. Jobs died on the same day as one of Dr. King's companions, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, one of the last living co-founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Dr. King, too, had had a close encounter with his own mortality when he was stabbed by a mentally ill woman at a book signing in 1958. He told that story a decade later to a rally on the night of April 3, 1968, and then turned, with unsettling foresight, to the possibility of his own early death. His words, at the beginning, could easily have been a part of Steve Jobs's commencement address:

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now."

But here Dr. King, the civic and religious leader, turned a corner that Mr. Jobs never did. "I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"

Is it possible to live a good, full, human life without that kind of hope? Steve Jobs would have said yes in a heartbeat. A convert to Zen Buddhism, he was convinced as anyone could be that this life is all there is. He hoped to put a "ding in the universe" by his own genius and vision in this life alone—and who can deny that he did?

But the rest of us, as grateful as we are for his legacy, still have to decide whether technology's promise is enough to take us to the promised land. Is technology enough? Has the curse truly been repealed? Is the troublesome world simply awaiting another Steve Jobs, the evangelist of our power to unfold our own possibilities?

And, correspondingly, was the hope beyond themselves, and beyond this life, that animated Dr. King and his companions merely superfluous to the success of their cause, an accident of religious history rather than a civic necessity?

For people of a secular age, Steve Jobs's gospel may seem like all the good news we need. But people of another age would have considered it a set of beautifully polished empty promises, notwithstanding all its magical results. Indeed, they would have been suspicious of it precisely because of its magical results.

And that may be true of a future age as well. Our grandchildren may discover that technological progress, for all its gifts, is the exception rather than the rule. It works wonders within its own walled garden, but it falters when confronted with the worst of the world and the worst in ourselves. Indeed, it may be that rather than concealing difficulty and relieving burdens, the only way forward in the most tenacious human troubles is to embrace difficulty and take up burdens—in Dr. King's words, to embrace a "dangerous unselfishness.""

Lessons from the life of a genius.

Steve Jobs, the man everyone is talking about today. All day I was amazed at how much chatter his death received, in the media, with my co-workers - we spent a good 15 minutes at the end of a meeting discussing Job's visionary approach to technology and how much he impacted the design community and technology on a whole. I never really gave Steve Jobs too much thought while he was alive, but clearly he made massive contributions that have not gone unnoticed.

You can read this obituary of Jobs and if you have 15 minutes watch the commencement speech he gave to Stanford grads in 2005, the title of it "How to live before you die."

Here is what I learned:

Do what you are passionate about, even if it seems frivolous. Steve Jobs took a calligraphy course at his college, calligraphy! Learning calligraphy would be sweet, but I would likely think: Calligraphy? Really, I'm probably just wasting my time, I should learn something more practical like economics or math. Guess what, Jobs said that calligraphy course gave him a love for typography which later impacted Apple. It was the first computer with beautiful fonts, giving them an edge. Crazy!!

It is okay to fail. In fact, your greatest failure could be the best thing that ever happened to you. When Steve Jobs was 30, he was fired from Apple. Fired. It was a heavy time for him. He even considered leaving Silicon Valley, but being ousted from the company that he formed pushed him in to "one of the most creative periods of his life" and on to create two companies: NeXT and Pixar. And guess what, years later Apple acquired NeXT and Jobs returned to Apple. Looking back Jobs said this "Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me...it was awful tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it."

When all is said and done, Steve Jobs was just a man, but when I read what is going around the web it's crazy how some seem to think otherwise.

I don't think one man's reflections on life or eloquent platitudes are what are going to save you or give you the life you've always wanted, I don't think he even had a full picture of what is truth is. (and contrary to the growing belief, technology isn't going to save us either.) That doesn't eliminate the fact that he was a genius in many ways. There are still nuggets of inspiration and truth in what he had to say and gave me food for thought. Cheers.

The pursuit of meaning.

How do you find meaning in life?

What gets you out of bed in the morning? What puts fire in your belly and a skip in your step? We are all living for something, no human can escape this. Some live for pleasure, success, passion, intellect, do-gooding, the list could go on and on.

Recently, I listened to a great podcast by Ravi Zacharias. Ravi is a tremendous communicator. If I were hosting a dinner party and could invite any five people in the world he would likely be on that list. Ravi is intelligent, interesting, a charming story teller, eloquent speaker, and lover of people.

This particular podcast was the third in a series on the pursuit of meaning. Ravi proposed that two of the elements of a meaningful life are Truth & Love.

1) Truth

We all believe certain things, in every areas of our lives: faith, science, thoughts on self, how the world works, etc etc. But is it true? Do you believe what you believe because it is easy, seems nice or is what you have always known? This is what Ravi had to say:

“If a man believing a certain religion looks at me and says “It makes me feel good”. My question to him isn’t whether it makes you feel good, LSD can make you feel good. My question is: is it true!”

1) Love

Ravi's second point: “You can not have meaning without love.”

"Ladies and gentlemen, before God I beg you to believe me - of all the thrills of lucrative benefits that the business or the preaching world could have brought to me, of all the wonder that comes from preaching at a conference with such great names, of all the joy that comes from meeting other people at conferences or what have you, reading some great books, and studying philosophy that can dazzle your mind. All of them have paled for so long into insignificance as I realize in that one minute I learned more about the meaning of life then in all the books in philosophy that I had ever read. Meaning comes from relationship."

That one minute: coming home to his young daughter.

Neither of these things stand alone as the meaning of life. If one became your meaning you will be crushed, no one will ever find all the answers we are looking for and human love doesn't solve all of our woes. Even so, how amazing are both of these things?! Neither are easy to come by, but I think they are worth fighting for. Who's with me?

Click here to hear what Ravi has to say about it