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The Tao of Springsteen
I was sat with my morning coffee last week, enjoying the quiet and reading “Born to Run”, Bruce Springsteen’s remarkable, heartfelt memoir, when this sentence stopped me in my tracks:
“We are one short breath of night and day, then dirt and stars, but we’re holding the new morning.”
He was writing, beautifully, movingly about the birth of his son, Evan James Springsteen, but what struck me was the wider point about our place in time. It is indeed a short breath that we have in this conscious world, but what a wonder that we can bring forward life, more breath and heartbeats that will sound long after we’re gone. It’s a form of immortality.
This thought, this idea, this awareness reminded me of something I’d read in a very different book, “Everything You Need You Have, How to be at Home in Yourself” by Gerad Kite. This lovely, wise little guide to life includes a wonderful introduction to some of the concepts of Taoism.
Taoism is new to me and I have found much in my reading that has resonated with me deeply, even though many of the enigmatic concepts can be difficult to grasp. So I started to wonder, could the lyrics of The Boss help me find my way into this ancient wisdom? It turned out that there was a rich seam to mine.
