Debbie and I had been married four years. We had been together for ten. We had already been through a lot. Some of our friends had broken up. We were still together. Still having fun. Still going strong.

I was proud of us.

I had no idea how long “still” was.

The Orleans song was released in 1976, so I could play the original here and take you right back to the way I heard it then.

But I want you to hear this version instead.

Still the One — Foxes and Fossils

I chose this version because these people have lived some life since 1976. They aren’t trying to recreate the past. They’re bringing the song into the present.

And that’s what happened to me.

When I first heard the song, I heard:

You’re still the one — FOR ME.

Now I hear:

You’re still the one — PERIOD.

It has taken me a lifetime to get from FOR ME to PERIOD.

Debbie is still the one. But she isn’t the same woman she was in 1976. Neither am I. We’ve accumulated experiences, joys, disappointments, scars, wisdom, foolishness and memories.

But there has only ever been one Debbie.

And there has only ever been one Steve.

The lawyer, judge, husband, father, entrepreneur, poker player, successes and failures weren’t different versions of me. They were experiences that Steve had.

The same “I” was there in 1976.

The same “I” is here in 2026.

The world will lose a treasure when Debbie dies. Same with Steve. But Debbie will still BE. Steve will still BE. She IS now. She will still BE then. Same with Steve.

I’ve spent a lifetime imagining the future. I’ve worked hard to become someone.

And now, at 74, I’m beginning to wonder about the premise itself.

If I already AM, what am I working so hard to BECOME?

(More of that bull shit we’ve had to work through without becoming cynical).

I don’t expect that question to make sense immediately. It didn’t make sense to me for most of my life.

Maybe that’s the point.

Maybe some things have to be lived before they can be understood.

So I’ll leave you with the question that took me 74 years to discover.

What song do you hear differently now than you did when you were young?

Tell me the song. More importantly, tell me what happened in your life that taught you how to hear it differently.

I never knew her.

(Music appreciation tip: Pay attention to Lindsey Buckingham’s acoustic riff as the bridge between verses beginning at 1:50. Music is what feelings sound like. Listen with your heart and hear the sound of joy and contentment. Look at their faces. They feel it too All is right with the world. And here’s one more: look at Stevie’s face at 1:43 when she talks about getting older. isn’t that how we all feel?)

Decades later, my childhood friend Pat Carden mentioned, in passing, that Stevie Nicks had gone to Crockett. The revelation fell on me like a meteor. I was not expecting it. It had never entered my mind.

I remembered “Landslide” as a catchy tune. Dedicated to her father. I heard it when I was young and imagined a landslide—snowy mountains collapsing, something I had seen on television or in movies. I paid no attention to the lyrics or metaphor.

Now I am 74. Stevie Nicks is 78.

The song hasn’t changed. I have. We have.

I still think about physical landslides, but now I hear something else: the landslides that happen in lives. Relationships. Bands. Dreams. Certainties. The things we thought were solid until they weren’t.

I wonder how Stevie hears “Landslide” now.

She wrote it as a young woman. What would 2026 Stevie Nicks tell that young Stevie? What does she know now that she didn’t know then?

What does she wish she still didn’t know?

I know what I would tell the boy I was:

Forget everything you think you know about life.

For the next fifty years, you will discover that almost all of it was bullshit. Some of that bullshit will be replaced with insights you cannot yet imagine.

Here’s the thing. No one will tell you. They know. Believe me, they know. But they signed a pact at your birth and promised to not rob you of the uniquely human experience of discovering your own truth.

That’s right. Doggedly fighting through piles and piles of bullshit before you understand that you must discover the insights yourself. And you must have confidence and integrity to abandon the bullshit and not replace it with cynicism.

Some insights will arrive with pain.

Don’t run from the pain. Don’t judge the pain.

Just be with it.

Some songs arrive carrying profound truths.

Others arrive wearing roller skates.

In 1971, Melanie released “Brand New Key,” a playful little tune about roller skates, bicycles, and a mysterious key. Critics spent years debating what it really meant. Melanie always seemed amused by the speculation.

I suspect she understood something many of us eventually learn.

Not everything important arrives looking important.

At seventy-four, I hear the song differently than I did at twenty.

When I was young, I thought life was about getting the bicycle.

The better job. The bigger house. The title. The recognition. The accomplishments. We spend decades collecting bicycles.

Then aging introduces a new question.

What do you do when the bicycle changes?

The knees aren’t quite what they used to be. The names don’t come as quickly. The technology seems to update every six minutes. Restaurants replace QR-code menus with apps, and apps replace whatever came before. Sometimes it feels as though the world is speaking a language you once knew fluently but now understand only with subtitles.

The temptation is to focus on what has been lost.

But that’s not what the song does.

The singer isn’t complaining.

She isn’t lamenting the fact that she has roller skates while someone else has a bicycle. She isn’t angry that things aren’t the same.

She’s trying to connect.

I’ve got this.

You’ve got that.

Maybe we can make something happen.

That strikes me as one of the great secrets of aging.

The equipment changes.

The desire to connect doesn’t.

I no longer race in triathlons. The body that carried me through races years ago has negotiated a different contract. These days I’m more likely to be found walking with a cane than sprinting toward a finish line.

Different equipment.

Same journey.

The older I get, the more I realize that curiosity may be the most valuable asset we possess. Not intelligence. Not strength. Not experience.

Curiosity.

The willingness to say, “I’ve never done it that way before. Show me.”

The willingness to learn a new app, try a new restaurant, make a new friend, listen to a new song, start a new project, or chase a new idea.

The willingness to keep showing up.

Aging loudly isn’t pretending you’re young.

It’s refusing to become old in spirit.

It’s understanding that life keeps changing the locks and having enough faith to keep carrying keys.

Sometimes they fit.

Sometimes they don’t.

But every now and then you discover that someone else has been looking for exactly the key you’ve been carrying all along.

And suddenly the roller skates don’t seem so silly after all.

They seem like freedom.

Or possibility.

Or hope.

Not bad for a song about a brand new key.

There is a line in the Bosch novels and television series that has always stayed with me:

“Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

On its surface, it is a detective’s creed. Every victim matters. Every life matters. No one gets pushed aside because they are poor, old, forgotten, inconvenient, or invisible.

The older I get, the more I think it is also a creed for aging.

Our culture keeps score differently.

It counts youth.

It counts beauty.

It counts productivity.

It counts influence.

It counts followers, income, status, and relevance.

The rest of us slowly begin to disappear.

A retired man sitting alone in a diner.

A widow walking through a grocery store.

A grandfather using a cane to cross a parking lot.

An old woman living quietly in the house where she raised her children.

The world looks past them as if their story has already been written.

But it hasn’t.

One of the great lies about aging is that our value declines as our usefulness declines.

I don’t believe that.

I have known too many older people whose greatest contribution came after the world stopped paying attention.

They became listeners.

Mentors.

Witnesses.

Keepers of stories.

They carried wisdom that could not have been acquired any other way.

The song that comes to mind is Everybody Is a Star by Sly and the Family Stone.

Not because everyone becomes famous.

Not because everyone gets a spotlight.

Because every human being carries a light that deserves to be seen.

The song reminds us that dignity is not earned by achievement. It belongs to us simply because we are here.

At seventy-four, I am beginning to understand that more clearly.

The finish line is somewhere ahead. I do not know where.

Neither do you.

But while we are here, every life matters.

Every struggle matters.

Every dream matters.

Every scar matters.

Every story matters.

Everybody counts or nobody counts.

I think that may be one of the most important lessons of growing old.

The world may stop counting.

You don’t have to.

Everything I know about growing old I learned fro

Listen: “Pieces of April” — Three Dog Night

They’re not dramatic. They don’t arrive with a moral attached. They don’t announce themselves as turning points. They’re fragments — a few mornings that felt workable, a few afternoons when the air moved in and out without resistance, a stretch of days where nothing in particular was solved but nothing in particular collapsed either.

I can’t claim April changed everything.
But I can’t say it didn’t change anything.

That’s the quiet conflict inside Pieces of April. When you say you have pieces of April in you, you’re already speaking from after. The window has passed. The light has shifted. What remains is either integration or memory.

Did those gentle days become part of the structure of my life?
Or are they simply proof that such days once existed?

I don’t know yet.

I know that in April there were mornings when I woke without bracing. Nothing had resolved. The same body. The same concerns. The same unfinished business sitting quietly at the edges of the room. But the internal weather had cleared just enough to make the day inhabitable. The machinery hummed instead of grinding. The road widened instead of narrowing.

It didn’t feel like transformation. It felt like reprieve.

And reprieve, if you live long enough, becomes its own category of grace.

When you’re younger, you tend to treat a good stretch as evidence of permanent change. Something has shifted. Something has been corrected. The arc is bending toward improvement. You assume momentum. You think: this is the beginning of the new phase.

Later on, you learn a different arithmetic.

A good week is just a good week.
A clear morning is just a clear morning.
A month where the system behaves is something to notice, not something to trust.

You stop demanding that the window stay open. You stop insisting that relief become resolution. You let the stretch be what it is: a temporary alignment that makes the present livable.

April was like that.
A few days that held together.
A few turns in the road that didn’t tighten the chest.

And now it’s May.

The question isn’t whether April fixed anything. It didn’t. The body still negotiates. The mind still loops. The world still tilts unpredictably. The same uncertainties sit in their usual chairs. But something subtle may have shifted in the nervous system. Some echo of those days may have lodged itself quietly in the structure.

Maybe it’s just a memory bouquet.

Or maybe not.

Maybe what remains is simply the memory of inhabitable time. A record that says: there was a stretch where the weight sat differently on the shoulders. There was a stretch where breathing felt less like work. There was a stretch where the day didn’t ask for anything except presence.

That memory matters more than we admit.

The culture prefers transformation stories — before and after, breakdown and breakthrough, fall and rise. But most lives, especially longer ones, are lived in the middle. Not broken. Not resolved. Just… holding together for a while, then not, then holding together again.

We move from window to window.

April was a window.
May is the room after the window closes.

Standing here now, I can’t tell whether those pieces of April are inside me as structure or inside me as memory. I don’t know whether the body learned something it can return to, or whether it simply experienced a brief clearing that has already moved on.

Maybe the distinction isn’t that important.

Maybe what matters is that I noticed it at all. That when the machinery hummed instead of grinding, I didn’t rush past it. That when the day felt inhabitable, I let it be inhabitable without demanding permanence. That when the stretch of time held together, I stood inside it long enough to recognize the feeling.

There’s a kind of dignity in that restraint. In letting good days remain small. In allowing reprieve to be reprieve without turning it into a narrative of recovery. In carrying forward the faint imprint of ease without insisting that it last.

Now it’s May.
The light is different.
The calendar has turned.

What I have are the pieces.

A few mornings that didn’t begin with bracing.
A few days where the system hummed.
A few stretches of time that proved the life I’m living can, at intervals, be inhabited without resistance.

Not a cure.
Not a resolution.
Not a permanent shift.

Just evidence.

Evidence that somewhere inside the ongoing weather, there are still windows.
Still alignments.
Still moments when the road widens and the weight sits differently and the day asks nothing more than that I be there to live it.

April is gone.
May has arrived.

But I am carrying something forward —
whether it’s structure or memory, I can’t yet say.

Only that for a while, the life I have held together.

Not empty. Just quiet in the way bars get after midnight when the loud stories run out and people start sitting with themselves again.

Billy had been playing slower songs most of the evening. The kind that settle into the room instead of trying to own it.

Then out of nowhere, he started playing My Maria.

A couple near the back laughed softly when they recognized it. Somebody at the bar said, “Man, I haven’t heard this in thirty years.”

Joe wiped down a glass and smiled without looking up.
“That song’s older than some regrets,” he said.

And for a minute the room got lighter.

Not younger.
Just lighter.

Funny thing about getting older. Sometimes a song you once danced to comes back sounding completely different. You hear things that weren’t there before.

“There were some blue and sorrow times…”

That line lands differently after you’ve buried people. After disappointments. After the years taught you that joy and sorrow usually travel together.

And then Billy sang:

“Sunlight surely hurts my eyes…”

Not like a complaint.
More like a man who stayed up long enough to know what mattered.

That’s what music does when you age.
It stops being background noise and starts becoming evidence.

Evidence that some part of you survived every version of yourself you used to be.

And sometimes that survival sounds a lot like an old song you didn’t know you still needed.

[Geek note: I often say music is what feelings sound like. I chose the version below because it illustrates that so perfectly. Britt describes exactly the feelings this song is painting. This isn’t a site dedicated to music enjoyment. But I couldn’t help myself. Next time you are listening to a song, try finding the feelings the song is painting for you. And the breath control of Mr. Skunk Stripe. Take a breath dude. One final personal note. I went to law school in Lubbock, Texas. Mr. Skunk Stripe and I went to the same church. He was, of course, much younger.]

That doesn’t mean they disappear.

By a certain age, most of us are no longer carrying fresh wounds. We are carrying bruises. Places in memory that still ache when pressed. A sentence someone said forty years ago. A dream that quietly failed. A friendship that drifted away without a fight. The phone call that came too late. The apology that never came at all.

Bruises on memory.

That line from Dwight Yoakam’s A Thousand Miles from Nowhere has stayed with me for years because it says something simple and devastating at the same time. Bruises are different from wounds. Wounds announce themselves. Bruises live underneath the surface. They fade. Then certain light hits them and suddenly they hurt all over again.

Aging teaches you this.

You can be sitting in a chair on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon and hear a song you haven’t heard in twenty years. Suddenly you are back in an apartment, a hospital room, a pickup truck, a kitchen at midnight, or standing beside somebody you once thought would walk beside you forever.

Memory does not die in order.

It waits.

And sometimes music is what touches the bruise.

What I’ve learned is that aging is not really about becoming old. It is about becoming layered. Every year adds another layer of love, regret, joy, disappointment, grief, forgiveness, and endurance. Some of those layers harden into wisdom. Others remain tender no matter how much time passes.

That tenderness is not weakness.

It is evidence that we lived.

The older I get, the less interested I am in people who pretend they have escaped pain. I trust the ones who carry it quietly. The ones who can sit in silence without needing to perform strength. The ones who understand that survival is not always dramatic. Sometimes survival is simply continuing to get up every morning carrying things nobody else can see.

That song also understands another truth about aging.

You eventually realize that life is not a straight road toward arrival. Most of us spend years believing we are headed somewhere final — success, security, peace, understanding. Then one day you look around and realize life was mostly movement itself. A thousand miles from nowhere. Still driving. Still searching. Still becoming.

And somehow there is beauty in that too.

Maybe wisdom is finally understanding that bruises are not proof that life failed.

They are proof that life touched us deeply enough to leave a mark.

Listen: “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere” by Dwight Yoakam

They are carrying unfinished conversations.

That may be one of the quiet sorrows of aging.

Not the fights.
Not even the losses.

The words that never quite found their way into the room before time ran out.

When we are young, we assume there will always be another holiday dinner, another phone call, another long drive together, another chance to explain ourselves better than we did the last time. We live as if life automatically renews itself every morning.

Age slowly teaches otherwise.

One day you realize the people you love are aging too.

Their hands change.
Their voices thin.
They tire more easily.
Stories begin repeating themselves because memory has started folding inward instead of outward.

And somewhere in the middle of ordinary life, the clock quietly stops pretending.

That is why The Living Years hits differently when you are older than when you first heard it.

Young people hear a song about a father and son.

Older people hear inventory.

The conversations they postponed.
The forgiveness they delayed.
The gratitude they assumed could wait.
The questions they never asked their parents while they still could.

By the time many of us understand our parents as human beings instead of simply “our parents,” time has already begun pulling at the edges.

You start seeing things you missed when you were younger.

How much pressure they carried.
How frightened they probably were at times.
How often they improvised their way through adulthood while pretending to know exactly what they were doing.

You begin to understand that your father was once a young man trying to hold his life together.
Your mother was once a young woman carrying fears she rarely spoke aloud.

Age softens certain judgments.

Not all of them.
But enough.

And then comes the realization that changes everything:

The living years are not infinite.

One day, the chance to say certain things simply disappears.

Not dramatically.
Not with warning music playing in the background.

Just a phone call.
A hospital room.
An empty chair at Thanksgiving.
A name that shifts from present tense to memory.

And yet aging also teaches something else.

Love does not end neatly at death.

The people we lose continue moving through us.

In our gestures.
In our humor.
In the phrases we accidentally repeat to our children.
In the way we comfort someone.
In the values we defend without even remembering where we first learned them.

We become living echoes of those who raised us.

Maybe that is why unfinished conversations stay with us so long. Part of us still believes the relationship itself continues.

Maybe it does.

I have come to believe that one of the great responsibilities of aging is learning to say things while the living years are still here.

Tell people they mattered.
Tell them they changed you.
Tell them you understand now.
Tell them you were listening even when it did not appear that you were.

Because eventually life stops granting extensions.

And after enough years, you realize that love is rarely measured by perfection.

More often, it is measured by what continues.

The call you still hear in your head.
The lesson you still carry.
The promise you still keep.

Long after the voice itself is gone.

🎵 “The Living Years” — Mike + The Mechanics

There comes a point in life when you stop hearing certain songs the way you heard them before.

Not because the songs changed.

Because you did.

When I was younger, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door sounded dramatic to me. Cinematic. Mysterious. The kind of song you listened to late at night when you wanted to feel older than you were. Back then, heaven’s door was somewhere far away — a poetic image floating safely in the distance.

That changes with age.

Not all at once. Quietly.

A funeral here. A hospital room there. A friend’s diagnosis. Your own medications lined up beside the coffee maker. You wake up one morning and realize the conversation has changed. Mortality is no longer philosophy. It has entered the room and taken a chair near the wall.

You don’t think about it every day. At least I don’t. But you become aware of something you could ignore when you were younger: the door exists.

And it’s closer now.

Oddly enough, that realization can either shrink your life or deepen it.

Some people spend enormous energy pretending the door is not there. They treat aging like a system failure. Every wrinkle becomes an insult. Every ache feels like betrayal. Entire industries are built around convincing us that growing older is something to hide from, apologize for, or defeat.

But life does not negotiate that way.

The truth is simpler and harder: the door was always there. We just finally became old enough to see it.

And once you see it, strange things begin to happen.

Small moments start mattering more.

A quiet dinner with your wife becomes enough.

An unexpected phone call from an old friend feels almost sacred.

You begin to understand why your parents sat silently on the porch some evenings. They weren’t bored. They were listening. To the wind. To memory. To time itself moving past them.

You also begin to notice how much unnecessary weight you carried for most of your life.

Old arguments.

Old resentments.

The need to impress people you don’t even like.

The endless pressure to become somebody.

Aging has a way of stripping the performance out of things.

At some point, many of us quietly stop asking, “How important am I?” and start asking, “What actually mattered?”

That may be the real gift hidden inside growing older.

Not wisdom exactly.

Clarity.

The song itself is weary and restrained. It does not sound panicked to me anymore. It sounds tired. Human tired. The kind that comes after carrying responsibilities, disappointments, grief, fear, and hope for a very long time.

That is probably why the song survives generations. Underneath the lyrics is something universal: eventually every human being realizes they are temporary.

And yet we keep loving people anyway.

We plant gardens we may never fully see bloom.

We hold our grandchildren.

We tell stories.

We sing songs.

We continue.

That’s the part I understand differently now. The awareness of the door does not make life meaningless. It makes it precious.

Maybe that is why older people often become softer in some ways. Not weaker. Softer. More willing to forgive small things. More aware that time is finite. More aware that most moments never announce themselves as important while they are happening.

One day you realize the ordinary Tuesday afternoon was the good old days.

And you didn’t know it.

I think that’s what aging does when you allow it to tell the truth. It removes the illusion that life is permanent and replaces it with something far more valuable: attention.

You begin to pay attention.

To music.

To silence.

To people.

To mornings.

To your own life.

The song never tells us to rush toward heaven’s door. It simply acknowledges that the door exists.

For me, aging loudly is not about denying that truth.

It is about standing fully in the light that remains on this side of the door while the music is still playing.

But that’s not harmony.
That’s obedience.

Real harmony is harder.
It’s difference that stays in the room.

I didn’t understand that until later in life, when the world started pulling apart faster than it could be stitched back together. Opinions hardened. People disappeared into tribes. Conversations became performances. Even families learned how to sing over one another instead of with one another.

Harmony, it turns out, isn’t something you impose.
It’s something you listen your way into.

I hear that lesson most clearly in The Fifth Dimension — a group that never tried to sound like one voice, but let five voices remain themselves while trusting the space between them. When I listen to
“Aquarius / Let the Sunshine In”

what moves me now isn’t the optimism. It’s the architecture. Each voice holds its line. No one dominates. No one disappears. The whole only works because the parts are allowed to stay distinct.

That’s aging, too.
We stop trying to blend in.
We stop trying to be the melody all the time.
We learn to be a harmony line — necessary, quieter, truer.

And then there’s “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, which Paul McCartney called the greatest song ever written:

By the time that song reaches the final round of overlapping lines, it’s no longer about romance. It’s about interdependence. Fragile voices leaning on each other to hold the song together. If one drops out, the whole thing collapses. If one overpowers, it breaks the spell.

That’s the late-life lesson Brian Wilson somehow recorded decades early:
Love isn’t the lead vocal.
It’s the willingness to stay in tune with someone else’s uncertainty.

Harmony is what happens when we stop insisting on being right and start caring whether the song survives. (I wonder if that is why McCartney was so overwhelmed).

At this age, I don’t need more volume.
I don’t need more certainty.
I don’t even need resolution.

I just want voices that stay.
Notes that listen.
And people who know when to come in, and when to soften.

That’s harmony.

And when it appears — even briefly —
it’s enough to carry the whole song.

The echo lingers longer than the note.

I’m Scared by Burton Cummings waited for me.

I don’t remember when I first heard it. I must have. It was there, somewhere in the background of a life that was too busy trying to become something to notice what was already true.

But I heard it differently the other day.

Not as a performance.
Not as a confession.

More like a recognition.

There’s a moment—no one tells you when it’s coming—when you realize you’re not outgrowing fear.

You’re just running out of places to hide it.

When you’re younger, fear is dressed up as something else:

• ambition

• urgency

• the need to prove you belong in the room

It keeps you moving. Keeps you building. Keeps you from asking certain questions that don’t have answers you can control.

And then, somewhere along the way, the costumes stop fitting.

The urgency softens.
The proving gets tired.
And what’s left standing there… is something simpler.

Something quieter.

I’m scared.

Not the loud kind.

Not panic. Not crisis.

Just the steady awareness that:

• time isn’t as open-ended as it once felt

• some doors are closed because you walked past them

• and some are closed because they were never yours to begin with

It’s not dramatic. That’s the part that surprises you.

It’s almost… honest.

I used to think the goal was to outgrow that feeling.
To replace it with wisdom. Or acceptance. Or some version of peace that looked like certainty.

But that’s not what happens.

What happens is this:

You stop trying to solve it.

You stop pretending it’s something else.

And in that space—without the performance, without the distraction—fear changes.

Not into courage.

Into something more useful.

Presence.

There’s a kind of clarity that only shows up when you’re no longer negotiating with reality.

When you’re not trying to win an argument with time.

When you can sit there—quietly—and admit what’s actually there.

I’m scared.

And somehow, that’s enough.

Because once you stop running from it, something unexpected happens.

It doesn’t get bigger.

It gets still.

Maybe that’s what aging does, more than anything else.

It doesn’t remove the fear.

It removes everything that kept you from seeing it clearly.

And once you see it clearly…

it loses its need to shout.

I heard that song again the other day.

And for the first time, it didn’t sound like someone else’s voice.

It sounded like mine.

Not at the same time.
Not for the same reasons.

But they’ve both been there—like markers on a road I didn’t fully understand while I was driving it.

The first one is about urgency.

👉

It doesn’t ease into your life. It grabs you.

We gotta get out of this place.

That’s not a suggestion.

That’s a conclusion.

When I first heard that song, I didn’t think about geography.

I thought about momentum.

High school.
College.
Law school in Lubbock, Texas.

I wasn’t trying to explore anything.

I was trying to get somewhere.

Fast.

I had already made a quiet decision, even if I didn’t say it out loud:

I was not going to be outworked.

I knew it wasn’t healthy.

I also knew it gave me an edge.

So I kept it.

Leaving Lubbock wasn’t dramatic.

It wasn’t some cinematic moment where I looked back one last time.

It was just… the next step.

Another move forward.

Another place where I could keep going.

At the time, I would have told you that was the goal.

Get out.
Move on.
Build something.

The second song came later.

👉

This one doesn’t push.

It reflects.

Happiness is Lubbock, Texas in my rearview mirror.

That line always made sense to me.

Because by then, I had something to point to.

A career.
A track record.
A life that, by most measures, was working.

And the story writes itself:

Leaving was the right move.

For a long time, I held both of those ideas without questioning them.

You have to get out.
And when you do, you’ll be glad you did.

Both felt true.

What I didn’t see—at least not clearly—was that I had carried something with me the entire time.

I didn’t just leave Lubbock.

I brought the same engine with me.

The same drive.
The same refusal to slow down.
The same quiet belief that if I stopped… I might lose something I couldn’t afford to lose.

I remember overhearing my son tell his brother one time:

“The reason Dad never loses—even at Monopoly—is because you can’t outwork him.”

He meant it as a compliment.

I took it that way.

I didn’t correct him.

Looking back, I’m not sure if that was the moment I understood something…

or the moment I decided not to.

Because here’s what those two songs never tell you.

The first one tells you to leave.

The second one tells you it was worth it.

But neither one tells you what happens if you never learn how to stop.

At 74, I can finally see the pattern clearly.

I’ve spent a lifetime running hard—
on empty,
against the wind,
always getting out of somewhere…
and calling whatever I left behind “yesterday” so I didn’t have to look too closely at it.

I’m not rewriting that story.

It built a life.

It gave me an edge.

It gave me a lot.

But I’m starting to wonder something I never asked before:

If you don’t have to get out anymore…
what would it mean to stay?

I don’t have an answer yet.

But for the first time…

I’m willing to sit with the question.

Nobody inside noticed.

Billy Morales was already at the piano, working his way through something soft, like he was giving the room time to arrive.

Joe Carver wiped the bar in slow, even strokes.

Carla Ruiz set a drink down in front of Rick Halpern and studied him for a second.

“You ever just… stop?” she asked. “Like really stop?”

Rick smirked. “I’m sitting here, aren’t I?”

Carla tilted her head. “Your body, sí. The rest of you… not so much.”

That drew a quiet laugh from Paul Andrews.

“She’s not wrong,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve stopped thinking since 1998.”

From the end of the bar, Walt Brennan lifted his glass slightly.

“Some people don’t stop,” he said. “They just slow down enough to look like they did.”

Joe set another glass on the rack.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “How do you know when you’re moving forward… and when you’re just used to moving?”

That landed.

Not heavy.

Just… accurate.

Davey Morales leaned back on his stool.

“That’s easy,” he said. “If you stop and feel better, you were probably running too hard.”

Rick shook his head. “Yeah, but what if you stop and feel worse?”

Nobody answered right away.

Billy shifted.

The first notes came out steady. Familiar.

A rhythm that didn’t rush, but didn’t rest either.

👉

John Delaney smiled into his drink.

“That one right there,” he said. “That’s the whole thing.”

Carla looked at him. “Cuál?”

John tapped the bar lightly.

“People who don’t know how to turn it off,” he said.

Paul nodded. “Always on to the next thing.”

Rick stared at the bar.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Because the second you stop… something catches up.”

Joe glanced at him.

“What?”

Rick hesitated.

Then shrugged.

“Don’t know,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

Billy let the song carry the room.

Not loud.

Just present.

Davey took a sip.

“When I’m out there,” he said, “everything’s scheduled. You don’t have time to think about anything but what’s next.”

Joe nodded.

“And when you’re here?”

Davey looked around.

The bar. The piano. Carla weaving between tables. Walt at the end like he’d always been there.

“You’d think it’d be different,” he said. “But it’s not.”

Carla leaned in.

“Porque?”

Davey exhaled.

“Because I don’t know what to do with the space,” he said.

That sat there.

Paul laughed softly.

“Yeah,” he said. “Free time sounds great… until you have it.”

John nodded. “That’s when the noise shows up.”

Rick tapped the bar again, slower this time.

“I built my whole life on not stopping,” he said. “Now I’m not sure I could if I tried.”

Walt looked up.

“You could,” he said.

Rick met his eyes.

“Then why don’t I?”

Walt took his time.

“Because you don’t know who you are when you’re not moving.”

No one rushed to fill that.

Billy’s hands moved across the keys, steady as ever.

The song didn’t push.

It just kept going.

Carla broke the silence, softer now.

“So what is it?” she asked. “Ambition… or habit?”

Joe dried another glass.

“Maybe it starts as one,” he said. “Turns into the other.”

Davey nodded slowly.

“I used to think the goal was to get somewhere,” he said.

Rick gave a faint smile. “And now?”

Davey shrugged.

“Now I think the goal might be learning how to stop once you get there.”

John raised his glass slightly.

“Good luck with that.”

That got a quiet laugh.

Outside, a car rolled past on Viscount.

The dark “O” in the sign stayed dark.

Billy let the last notes drift off.

For a second, nobody moved.

Then, from the far end of the bar, a man who hadn’t said a word all night spoke up.

“I’m 74,” he said.

They turned toward him.

He didn’t look at anyone in particular.

Just at the glass in front of him.

“At 74, I’m still running hard on empty… against the wind… getting out of this place… with yesterday in my rearview mirror.”

Nobody interrupted.

He gave a small shake of his head, like he wasn’t judging it—just noticing it.

“Funny thing is,” he added quietly, “I don’t even know if I’m trying to get somewhere anymore.”

That settled into the room deeper than anything else had.

Billy didn’t play.

Joe didn’t speak.

Carla didn’t move.

They just let it sit there.

Like something that had finally caught up.

After a while, Billy went back to the keys.

Softer this time.

Almost like he was giving the room permission to stay.

And for once…

no one seemed in a hurry to go anywhere.

Every once in a while a song comes along that doesn’t just play on the radio — it announces a moment in your life.

For many of us growing up in the 1960s, that song was “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by The Animals.

It wasn’t subtle. It didn’t hide behind poetry or clever metaphors. The song said exactly what it meant.

If it’s the last thing we ever do…
We gotta get out of this place.

When we first heard it, most of us were still young. High school hallways. Friday night football. Cars that barely ran. The future felt enormous, but the place we happened to be standing in sometimes felt very small.

That song gave voice to a feeling we hadn’t quite figured out how to say yet.

There had to be something more than this.

The First Escape

Every generation eventually reaches the moment when the world it inherited begins to feel too small.

Sometimes it’s a town.

Sometimes it’s a job already waiting for you whether you want it or not.

Sometimes it’s simply the quiet realization that if you stay exactly where you are, life might slowly shrink around you.

Songs like this gave voice to that feeling. They didn’t analyze it. They didn’t explain it.

They declared it.

And once you hear that declaration, something begins to move inside you.

People left.

Some left for college.
Some left for the military.
Some simply started driving west until the road ran out.

But the engine behind all of it was the same simple belief.

The real story of our lives was waiting somewhere beyond the horizon.

The Life We Built

Years later many of us would discover something interesting.

Leaving is one thing.

Building a life is another.

Careers appear.
Families grow.
Responsibilities take root.

One day you wake up early, pour your coffee, and head out into the world to do the work you’ve chosen — or the work that has chosen you.

It was somewhere along that road that another song started to feel familiar.

Jackson Browne captured that moment beautifully in The Pretender. The song understood something we didn’t quite recognize yet: that adulthood often arrives quietly, disguised as responsibility.

Not defeat.

Just life unfolding the way life does.

Looking Back on the Long Road

And then, if we’re fortunate, we reach another stage.

The stage where we can pause long enough to look back.

That’s the territory Bob Seger walked into with Against the Wind.

The miles traveled.
The dreams that changed shape.
The quiet realization that the road we once ran so hard has carried us farther than we ever imagined.

When you hear that song later in life, it doesn’t sound like nostalgia.

It sounds like recognition.

Before All That

But before the building.

Before the reflection.

There was something simpler.

We were young.

And we believed the horizon held the real story.

That’s what makes “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” such a powerful song even now.

It reminds us of the moment when the future still felt wide open.

When escape meant possibility.

The Secret of Aging Loudly

What strikes me now is that the urge in that song never really disappears.

When we were young it meant escaping a town, a job, or the expectations waiting for us. Later it might mean escaping routines we built ourselves. The scenery changes, but the feeling is the same.

Somewhere inside us there is still a voice that believes the horizon holds another chapter.

And every once in a while a song comes along that reminds us it’s still there.

Earlier Aging Loudly reflections
The Arc of Life

• We Gotta Get Out of This Place —- early-life

• The Pretender — mid-life

• Against the Wind —- later=life

The early crowd had drifted out.

The late crowd hadn’t arrived yet.

That left the quiet hour Joe liked best. The hour when the bar stopped pretending to be lively and simply became what it was — a place where people came to think out loud.

Billy was at the piano in the corner, playing softly. Not really performing. Just letting the keys talk to themselves.

Joe glanced up.

“Billy,” he said, “you ever notice something about getting older?”

Billy didn’t stop playing.

“Couple things,” he said.

Joe leaned on the counter.

“You start hearing that people you knew… they’re gone.”

Billy nodded once and slid into a gentle run of notes.

Joe continued.

“I lost a friend this week. High school.”

Billy waited.

“She was one of those people,” Joe said. “Varsity cheerleader. Friends with everybody. Just full of light. The kind of person who made every memory a little brighter just by being there.”

The piano softened.

Joe looked down at the bar.

“And here’s the thing that hit me,” he said. “I never told her.”

Billy finally stopped playing.

“Told her what?”

Joe shrugged.

“That she mattered.”

A few seconds passed.

Billy leaned back on the bench.

“You’re not alone in that one.”

Joe shook his head slowly.

“That’s what scares me,” he said. “Who else is out there walking around right now who made my life better… and I never told them?”

Billy thought about it.

Then he turned back to the piano.

“Well,” he said quietly, “there’s a song about that.”

His fingers settled into the opening notes of Those Were the Days by Mary Hopkin.

Joe listened for a moment.

Then he nodded.

“Yeah,” he said softly.

“That fits.”

Reflection

There are people in our lives who become part of the background scenery.

They’re in the hallways of our high schools.
They’re in the stands at football games.
They’re laughing at the lunch tables and leaning against lockers and showing up in photographs we don’t look at for forty years.

They don’t just appear in our memories.

They light them.

You realize later that certain people made entire chapters of your life brighter simply by being who they were.

And most of the time you never told them.

Not because you didn’t feel it.

Because life moved fast and youth assumed there would always be more time.

Then one day you hear they’re gone.

And suddenly the question appears like a quiet knock on the door:

Who else out there never heard it from me?

Somewhere right now there are people walking around who shaped your life.

Teachers.
Teammates.
Friends.
Old neighbors.

People who probably have no idea that they were a small beam of light in someone else’s story.

We assume there will be another reunion.

Another phone call.

Another chance.

But time has a way of quietly closing doors we thought would stay open forever.

Which leads to a simple realization.

If there is someone you’re grateful for…

You might want to tell them.

Not someday.

Now.

Back at the Bar

Billy let the song drift through the empty room.

Joe stood there for a while listening.

Then he picked up the bar towel again and wiped the counter.

Slow circles.

Same as always.

Finally he looked over at Billy.

“You know what?” Joe said.

“What’s that?”

Joe shrugged.

“I think tomorrow I’m going to make a couple phone calls.”

Billy smiled.

“That,” he said, “might be the best song we’ve played all night.”

Sometimes a song puts words to something you’ve been watching for years.

Brooks & Dunn’s I Believe is about an old man who has made peace with the world.
Jackson Browne’s The Dancer contains a line that has stayed with me for a long time:

“Throw out some seeds of your own…”

I didn’t understand that line when I first heard it.

I think I do now.

Not because of anything I figured out on my own.

Because of three old friends.

I’ll call them Kern, RB, and Jai.

I’ve known Kern since the first grade.
Jai since the third.
RB came along in high school.

That’s a long time to watch people live.

Long enough to notice the small things people leave behind in others.

Kern and RB are soul mates and lost their son.

So did Jai.

If you’re a parent, that sentence needs no elaboration.

It’s the one nightmare most of us refuse to let our minds linger on.
I certainly can’t.

And yet they lived through it.

What has always struck me is not just that they survived.

It’s how they continued afterward.

No bitterness.
No anger.
No resentment at the unfairness of the universe.

Years later what you notice instead is something quieter.

A steadiness.

Recently Kern said something that stopped me cold.

He was reflecting on a passage of scripture that says death would be gain.

For him, he said, it would mean being reunited with his son.

I’ve read that passage before.
Heard sermons about it.

But it never landed the way it did when Kern said it.

Just imagine. To live with that longing for decades and still carry yourself with grace. That is beyond my ability to comprehend.

And when I listen to I Believe, the old man in the song could easily be any one of them.

Not because of what they’ve done.

Because of who they are.

Which brings me back to Jackson Browne’s line about seeds.

For a long time I assumed planting seeds meant doing something impressive with your life.
Building something visible.
Leaving accomplishments behind.

But the older I get, the more I suspect that’s not what he meant.

The real seeds people plant often have nothing to do with achievement.

They’re planted in quieter ways.

In how someone carries sorrow without poisoning the room around them.

In how they treat people.

In the simple dignity of continuing to show up for life.

Kern, RB, and Jai probably wouldn’t describe themselves in those terms.

But after more than sixty years of watching them live, I’ve come to believe something about them.

Their essence isn’t what they’ve done.

Their essence is who they are.

They chose—consciously or not—to simply BE.

And in doing that, they planted seeds.

Seeds they will never see grow.

Seeds that found their way into the lives of people around them.

Including mine.

Maybe Jackson Browne had it right.

Maybe planting seeds isn’t really an act of doing.

Maybe it’s an act of BEING.

I once asked for wonder.

It turns out the answer arrived in the lives of three old friends.

—

Author’s Note

Kern, RB, and Jai are real friends whose lives I’ve had the privilege of watching unfold for more than sixty years. I’ve used nicknames here out of respect for their privacy.

Some lessons in life arrive not through advice or instruction, but through watching how people live.

This essay grew out of that kind of lesson.

I put the song on again the other afternoon.

I’ve heard it for decades. Always with a certain respectful distance. It felt like a piece that contained meaning if only I listened closely enough, read carefully enough, assembled the images correctly. There was always the sense that somewhere inside those lines was a key I simply hadn’t found yet.

The opening came as it always does:

We skipped the light fandango…

And right on cue, the old familiar tension arrived.
What exactly is a light fandango?

The mind leaned forward. It wanted definition. Context. Accuracy. The part of me that has always believed that if something is presented, it must be understood. Preferably quickly.

Then, without asking permission, my brain supplied an image:
someone doing cartwheels across a living room floor.

Not metaphorical cartwheels. Actual ones.
Arms and legs in motion, a bit theatrical, slightly absurd.

I caught myself mid-analysis and noticed the picture just sitting there.
A person cartwheeling across the floor.

And then a quieter thought arrived:

That’s an interesting image to have in my head.

Not correct. Not incorrect.
Just… there.

For reasons I can’t fully explain, that small shift loosened something.
Instead of chasing the proper meaning of the lyric, I let the image remain. The cartwheels continued across the floor of my imagination without needing authorization from the Department of Interpretation.

The tension that usually accompanies this song — the urge to solve it — began to ease. Not dramatically. Just a slight exhale. Enough to notice.

The organ line moved underneath it all, steady and unhurried, like someone walking beside me rather than leading me somewhere. I realized I was no longer standing outside the song trying to understand it. I was sitting inside it, letting it move at its own pace.

Nothing had been explained.
Nothing resolved.

And yet something in me had settled.

There was a time when I treated nearly everything this way. Songs. Work. Conversations. Life itself. The assumption was that clarity was available if I worked hard enough to extract it. Preparation was a virtue. Anticipation a form of control. Reduce the unknown, and you reduce the risk.

That posture served me well for a long time. But not everything yields to preparation. Some things remain suspended, no matter how long you look at them.

The other afternoon, listening again, it occurred to me that perhaps the song was never asking to be solved. Perhaps it was offering a small rehearsal space. A place where the mind could reach for meaning while the music quietly demonstrated that nothing terrible happens if meaning takes its time.

The cartwheels came and went.
The lyric moved on.
The organ continued its calm descent.

I stayed.

I used to think maturity meant knowing.
Now I wonder if it sometimes means remaining present when knowing doesn’t arrive on schedule.

There was a time when I believed in the power of the uniform.

Not a literal uniform, though I had those too — suits pressed for court, shoes shined to a reflective seriousness, the small ritual of tying a tie as if I were tightening the day into place. I believed, as many of us did, that if you looked ready for the world, the world might treat you as if you were.

ZZ Top put that belief to music with a grin and a guitar line you could walk into a room with. (In my case, a courtroom) Sharp Dressed Man was never subtle. It didn’t pretend to be. It simply declared: presentation matters. The walk matters. The signal you send before you speak matters.

Think Dress for Success! A best seller on Amazon. A trial lawyer’s Bible!

When you’re young, you hear it as aspiration.
Put it on. Step out. Become.

Later, you hear something else.

You realize that most of life is lived in costume of one kind or another. The roles are practical. Necessary, even. Professional armor. Social shorthand. The small external structures that help you move through crowded rooms and complicated systems. You don’t question them much because they work. They get you admitted, seated, heard.

And then time passes.

Not abruptly. Quietly. One season leans into another. The suits hang a little longer in the closet between wearings. The rooms you once entered daily begin to recede. The walk slows, not from weakness but from a growing disinterest in arriving anywhere quickly just to prove you can.

That’s when the song changes.

You hear the opening riff and you remember how it felt to put on the outer version of yourself. The competent one. The ready one. The one who knew where to stand and what to say. And you feel something like gratitude for him. He did his job. He carried you through decades. He allowed you to participate in a world that often responds first to appearance and only later to essence.

He wasn’t false. He was functional.

But aging has a way of loosening the tie.

You begin to ask a quieter question:
What remains when I no longer need the costume?

Not in a dramatic shedding. Nothing so theatrical. More like a gentle unbuttoning. A recognition that the sharpness you once wore outwardly has moved inward. It shows up now as steadiness. As a kind of presence that doesn’t require announcement. You still know how to dress for the room. You just don’t always feel compelled to.

There’s a freedom in that. Not rebellion — you’ve done enough rebelling for one lifetime — but permission. Permission to keep the parts of the persona that were always true and let the rest fall away like last season’s fabric.

The sunglasses can stay if they still feel like you.
The walk can remain deliberate.
But the need to impress dissolves.

What’s left is a different kind of sharpness.
Not edge, but clarity.
Not style, but ease.

ZZ Top understood something about endurance. They carried the same beards, the same silhouettes, the same understated humor across decades. What started as style became identity through continuity. They didn’t outgrow it. They grew into it. And somewhere along the way, the performance and the person met in the middle and shook hands.

That’s the version of Sharp Dressed Man that plays now.

It’s no longer about turning heads when you enter the room. It’s about knowing who you are when you don’t. It’s about the quiet confidence that comes from having worn many versions of yourself and discovering that the core remained intact through all of them.

You still get dressed in the morning.
You still step out into the day.
But the uniform has softened into something closer to truth.

And if, on certain mornings, you choose the old jacket or the polished shoes, it isn’t because you need them. It’s because they’re part of the long story you lived inside. They remind you of the man who walked before you, clearing the path with a little extra shine.

You thank him for his service.

Then you step forward — not less sharp, but differently dressed.

I’m interested to see if you see what I see—
hear what I hear.

Ready?

Take a deep breath.
Let’s take a step back and survey the landscape.

Do you see them?

Thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of people yelling and marching and shouting. They’re clustered into tribes, each with its own banner, its own slogans, its own certainty. Arms raised. Voices hoarse. Faces tight.

What are they saying?

If you listen closely, it all starts to sound the same.
Not the words exactly—but the tone.

Hooray for our side.

Let’s sit with that for a moment.

Does it make you as uncomfortable as it does me?

I don’t doubt the sincerity. I don’t question the grievances. I’m not even trying to decide who’s right. What unsettles me is something else—the volume, the urgency, the sense that meaning must be found out there, amplified, shouted into existence.

When everything is turned outward, louder always feels like progress.

At some point, though, I need a counterweight.

That’s when a song like Look to Your Soul finds its way back.
You can listen to it here:

It doesn’t argue with the crowd.
It doesn’t refute anyone’s position.
It doesn’t offer a competing chant.

It does something far less ambitious—and far more difficult.

It turns inward.

The song doesn’t say withdraw from the world. It doesn’t say stop caring. It simply suggests that if everything outside is inflamed, maybe that isn’t the best place to look for clarity.

There’s no outrage in the voice.
No triumph.
No hurry.

Just a calm redirection, as if assuming you’ve already discovered that yelling—even righteous yelling—rarely delivers what it promises.

Listening now, I don’t hear instruction so much as recognition. The recognition that there comes a time when outward answers stop working. When more alignment, more affiliation, more noise only adds to the ache.

The song ends without resolution.

And that feels honest.

Some truths don’t compete in the public square.
They wait.

They wait for us to grow tired of shouting for our side—
and curious enough to ask what’s going on inside.

That’s usually where the real work begins.

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