Perspective Check

Nothing you can play or sing or do can ever be good, and you can never play a single good note--unless you have lots of love in your heart. And love for things that are pure and beautiful. I mean, even if you aren't a guy who is pure and beautiful himself or a girl who isn't pure and beautiful herself, or maybe if you've done some things so that your soul isn't as happy as it should be, if you keep a love in your heart for things that are righteous and true, then you can be can still be a great musician, writer, pharmacist, mathematician, engineer, businessman, friend, person. But unless you're all those things and have love in your heart, you can't.

T Bone Jackson, the great trombonist, once said that the word we all have to remember is "generosity". And even if you're great at something or you're really bitchin' at being the best theoretical physicist in the world, it means next to nothing--or it could mean so much more if you're able to get together and do it and share with other people. But you can never go into a laboratory or band or choir or church or gym and expect to achieve the next degree of spiritual, musical, professional or scientific enlightenment unless you love those people you're with. Unless you have really true, sincere love. Because you can never even have true anger if you don't have true love, and neither of them will ever have their full impact if they're not realized with one another.

And if someone says something to you or you find yourself in a situation where you don't feel like yourself, then just don't deal with it. Just be yourself as hard as you can, and be true to yourself the best you can. If you want to be pretty and pink like the softest rose growing in the spring time, then be that as pretty and beautiful and slippery as you can. And if you want to be the ugliest monster, then do that as best you can. Or if you want to be as free as the spirits of those who left--I'm talking Malcolm, Coltrane, and my man, Yousef--then I guess you, me and Common both have the same dream. But the most important thing is to always be true to yourself. And care. If you really care, you'll get somewhere.

So that's the deal with that.