The Concerts of Our Lives

The Concerts of Our Lives
 
We have all fallen in love with some celebrity or rock star, and their performances or avatars have made us swoon or feel invincible, even for the brevity of a movie or a concert.
 
These concerts of our lives have empowered us to think and dream and feel, in some way inebriated, or else sobered us into action, transformation, and self-fulfilment through role modeling and out of the lines lives to become more than we were, a closer approximation of our true selves.
 
How many young men followed Elvis into music or else martial arts?
 
How many women can trace their own lives back to Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe,  Aretha Franklin, or Barbara Streisand?
 
What movies, what concerts, what paintings, which songs, which actors, which Nobel prize winners, what ideas throughout history have brought us to our knees or else raised our spirits?
 
And, too, there are those intimate secrets and connections. Our traumas. Our exclusions. Our abdandonments. Our losses.
 
Each memorable facet of life networks our perspective into an overarching philosophy. We become ourselves one concert at a time. Some we choose. Many are heaved on us as burdens fallen from the sky. And yet, who would we be without them?
 
And still more, who will we become if we choose those future symphonies and stage plays, those quirky moments of synchronicity when for a split second in time we allowed the music of our hearts to fill the streets of our experience?
 
Isn't that what our mentors asked themselves, and are not theirs the stories of the wretched and divine?