Sometimes it Snows in April by Prince came on the radio because he’d died that morning, and one of the local stations was paying tribute to him with an uninterrupted afternoon of his music. It was April 21st, it was snowing, and it was heavy and wet. I was home working and thinking about how the graphic design profession keeps changing, and how the ground that I’d staked for myself decades earlier continued to morph and shrink. Because of this, I’d been planning to shift my focus on design work-related things for a long time, but I had a list of reasons not to.
Most types of big changes are riddled with anxiety and forward progress can be slow, glacial even, because I usually wait for the perfect time to begin, and because the perfect time is rare, I have another excuse to procrastinate. When I have moved beyond what’s stopping me, and real change does occur, I don’t often remember the details of how it happened, and what I did to help it along because the process takes so long. I’m not taking notes, and I’m not always objective, so, everything from beginning to end is nebulous and hard to describe.
However, somewhere between the amber light at my desk, and the blue light through the window, something felt different, even magical that afternoon. What I’d been thinking about, worried about, mulling over and over for years, needed to begin at that moment. I’d talked myself out of writing so many times, imposed so many rules and restrictions for myself, and listened to so many real and imaginary opinions, that it was difficult to start. I’d been stuck for a long time. Except that afternoon I felt unstuck. Something unexplainable intervened and gave me permission. So, I began to write and didn’t stop for hours. I hadn’t written a thousand non-work related words in one sitting for decades and I’d never heard the song Sometimes It Snows In April by Prince. Everything was released and merged into something fluid and better.
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“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” — Vaclav Havel
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For Prince
Sometimes It Snows In April by Prince, Waiting for My Real Life to Begin by Colin Hay, Survive by Reviver, and Gone On a Purple Cloud by Daily Bread
