Life In Music, Lessons from the HYNBM lyrics
Rush, rush, RUSH. Hurry up. Move on. Next! Speed it up. Time’s up. Time. (Help!) No time. Fast. Faster is better, fastest is best. Thirteen minutes to finish your test.
Recognize yourself somewhere in the above paragraph? It’s not surprising. We all get caught up in a world where it seems like it’s always rush hour. Rush is good for some things. We like the e-press bus because it gets us home faster and even the instant potatoes because sometimes we just can’t avoid being in a hurry.
When it comes to people we have to be very careful because rush is habit forming and extremely dangerous when taken in large continuous doses. People are not things and were not meant to be rushed all the time. I am more than an address with a zip code for faster delivery and a telephone number with an area code.
Listen to Olivia Newton-John as she sings about the importance of being mellow. Slow down, lay back, kick off your shoes, close your eyes, and relax for heaven’s sake. Stop your hurrying around and just enjoy being somebody for a while.
Life is a blend of doing and being. We’re so good at doing things and there’s always so much to do. Society demands results and measures a person’s worth by what he does. Not to do is lazy, bad and worthless. When we begin to treat others that way, and even ourselves, we may pile up a lot of rushing yardage but we’re going to lose the ball game.
We’ve got to realize that just BEING is important, too. In fact, who we are is more important than what we do. Who we are means exploring our inside life. If we speed too much just on our outside activities, who will be left when all the doing is done?
To be mellow is to be patient with life, to wait for the budding of the flower, the ripening of the fruit, the aging of the wine and the birth of the child. It is to be patient with our own mistakes as we seek to discover who we are. To be mellow is to let ourselves be loved, to allow ourselves to be touched by others.
Mellowness means being able to lose some of our toughness, to stop trying to be in control of everything all the time, to let go and relax. When the world shouts, “Don’t just stand there do something!” we know that there are times when it is more important to shout back, “Don’t just do something stand there!”
We learn as we stand in wonder before the glory of creation and the beauty of life. We learn that we are special, we are loved. Our creation was not the product of some rush job, but the gentle touch of a loving God who asks only that we be mellow with all of life, and ourselves as well as others.