For the past few weeks, Dan Auerbach’s “Undertow” has started most of my mornings. The tune is just one of those ones you’d imagine in an opening scene of a movie, driving a dirt road, whatever, you know what I’m talking about.
Ironically, every time that song comes on I almost appears to leave my physical self for that 3:23 seconds. The kick drum matched with the bass and guitar line in the intro, into the explosion of sound to the first verse makes me truly feel like I am in a movie. Every. Fucking. Time.
And maybe that’s all this life has to be, imagining yourself as the star of the movie, a movie where you have full and complete control of how the script moves and reads. You have that control, even though the current state of our world has all of us thinking otherwise.
Sitting in the dark morning hours drinking my coffee like I do so many mornings, I try to find something different to listen to, something that might spark one of those moments where second nature kicks in and out of nowhere, I find myself writing, deciphering, weeding out all the good and bad that fills this mind of mine.
Discursive thinking has always impacted my life, negatively and positively. The flow of thoughts has always been that of a wild river, like the ones you’d expect to see in the b-roll of an opening scene of a movie, with “Undertow” backing it.
Writing, creating, whatever takes me from the mind of a jumping Mexican bean to what I believe is the closest thing to a flow state, the state where I feel most free, connected to whatever “god”, universe, higher power out there. There is no need to even try to put a name to it. In those moments all you have to do is just be. JUST BE.
Joe Rogan talks in a podcast with Bryan Callen about how you should look at your life like you’re the star in the movie. Think of Will Smith in “Pursuit of Happyness”, although dramatized and made Hollywood, that flick is something I’ve come back to many times in my short 23 years in this world.
“Hey. Don’t ever let somebody tell you, you can’t do something.
Not even me. All right?
You got a dream?
You gotta protect it.
People can’t do something themselves, they want to tell you you can’t do it.
You want something? Go get it! Period!”
The idea that YOU have all the power in the world to make something out of yourself, whether or not that is a Wall Street broker or an artist, the pursuit of something once imagined or only in your wildest dreams is something nobody should squander or push away. Rather, sit with and sort through all that there is to these types of things. Doubt, resistance, the list goes on and on. It’s easier to just squash all of these ideas and continue to sit in the comfort of your present situation, even though oftentimes that comfort is more painful than the actual change itself.
Rogan says to write everything down, Matthew McConaughey says the same in his new book, “Greenlights”, and countless college professors begged us new generation to do the same. And this is far easier said than done, as many of us know. Our mind has this “beautiful” way of running rampant with thoughts up until the point where the pen hits the paper. Nothing. But that nothing often results in some of the best thoughts, that is if it is taken with patience and an open mind.
Our culture has driven us away from our minds, consumed in whatever the fuck is on these devices that litter our lives. And I don’t just mean our cellphones, I mean our televisions, alcohol, marijuana, whatever, things that often times take our minds off the present moment. And when we get lost in our thoughts and don’t take the time to weed them out and see if a new reality is possible, we jump to the next social media post or Netflix show without even taking more than five minutes to sit with this crazy fucking idea of how we’re going to pull ourselves out of this hole we’ve found ourselves in.
Write your own movie. Make your biggest dreams and aspirations possible. I’m not saying quit your job, but make time for that thing that brings you to that flow state I mentioned earlier. If you can find a way to make that flow state lucrative, explore it. Abundance isn’t an issue, rather, finding your OWN flow, your own style. Nobody likes an unoriginal movie, plot, storyline — so how are you going to flip the script?
Chad Ripley 