| Following Your 2:00am Voice |
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| Posted by Matt Conner |
05:38 PM Thursday, 23 August 2007 |
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Those voices can be pretty confusing, but there is no
doubt that if you follow your 2:00am voices you'll end up someplace
fairly extraordinary." -Josh Ritter
When I first read this quote from the absolutely underappreciated Josh Ritter, something struck a chord within me. After all, I just recently followed my own 2:00am voice which meant creating a whole new music webzine just a couple weeks ago called Stereo Subversion. After a few years of writing on my own, striving for various positions as a freelancer, Stereo Subversion is now a live and realized dream. The questions in the morning always drowned out the dreams from the night before. Laying awake with thoughts of, "Oh, I would definitey interview this person" or "I would certainly focus on this area" dissipate when the day job hits you with the sun. It's as if daybreak refers to more than just the darkness. But I guess I would say that I'm learning to think differently. Josh Ritter is onto something. I work with enough people around me in my weekly routine to have learned that everyone I encounter has a 2:00am voice. Most people don't follow it, simply because it seems so unreal. And many more won't even admit it, for fear that saying that very thing out loud might shatter the possibility because it seems so fragile. To mention it is to blow on the house of cards it's resting upon. But for me at least, speaking it aloud was the very thing that set it into motion. I learned that my 2:00am voice needed to be heard by other people with the same dream, the same voice speaking to them. Community awakened the dream and its fragility was actually resting upon my inability to say anything about it. So Josh Ritter is correct when he speaks of following the 2:00am voice inside of all of us. But what he fails to include is that following that path usually means walking it with someone else. And when a community of voices come together, that's when the extraordinary truly comes to life. |
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