Driving lessons are sweet, when you don’t have a car of your own.  Some people drive everyday to get places.  I just drive for the experience.

I got driven home by my instructor’s next student, and it made me feel a lot better about my own driving.  She had a heavy foot, and veered to the right of the lane consistently.  I gasped a number of times, even though I was trying to keep quiet.

She reinforced a lesson for me about attention: you may know to stop at a stop sign, but you won’t notice the signs if you’re preoccupied with something else.  I could tell by her response that she knows to stop at stop signs.  Still, she slides through each one.

The trick is: what’s going on in her head, and how do we push it aside to make room?

So, another retreat leaves me with a refined outlook on life.  I went on a ten-day silent meditation retreat out of town, where I lives like a monk and learned the practice of Vipassana meditation.

If you’ve ever wondered what life would be like out of the rat race, if you’ve ever wanted to be able to focus your mind, if you’ve ever wondered if you could last ten days without communication, this is the thing to do!  My friends all joke about it in public, but they ask me in private how to sign up.

Warning: you’ll be surprised to see just how wild and unruly the mind can get without all of modern day life’s distractions.  For a full disclosure of my experience: http://www.dstbe.com/blog/?p=864

I’ve been doing a song-writer’s retreat for the past few days, working with aspiring and successful songwriters, and it’s been fantastic.  I love what it’s doing for me.  These guys KNOW the craft. They don’t just say, “I like that song”.  They say, “I like the rhythm, and the phrasing”. They say, “The song loses its train of thought in the second verse”. They say, “The chorus works because it’s a mental break from all the imagery in the verses.”  They say, “Lyrics, it moves, but musically, the song doesn’t go anywhere.”  I like to think that I’ve found my kin.

I must sleep, now. We’re four days into the retreat, and I’ve been getting only 4 hrs of sleep each night.

I’m thinking crazy: become an entrepreneur.  Go head first into your music.  Perform often.  Make content available.  Be accessible.  Build a fanbase.  That’s showbiz.

The biggest problem I have is shutting up the voice in my head that says, “You’re just dreaming.  You’ll never find it in you to do it.”

I couldn’t shut it up.  Life just kept refusing to work for me, and the voice wouldn’t stop nagging me.  So, two birds with one stone: I quit my job and I’m confronting this voice.  We’ll see what I make out of it.

Here I go!