This summer was a good summer for me. Sure, there was pain. Yes, there was confusion. And I had my fair share of hopelessness. But one of the things that filled my summer with so much joy was the chance to delve back into the realm of songwriting.
You see, over the school year I’m asked to do various music assignments and think about music theory, yet my own compositions were suffering. I was at a loss for what and how to write again. I quickly blamed school, saying, “Oh, I don’t have time to write – that’s why things are amiss.” But at the beginning of summer, free from my school obligations, I still felt a restlessness and confusion that I couldn’t shake – I couldn’t write music!
I finally broke down.
I’d been trying so hard – so dang hard! – to write these intricate and amazing, creative and dark ideas that it had escaped me that I was striving to achieve something that was outside of my grasp. I was trying to do things that simply weren’t coming naturally to me, as if to say, “Oh, well if it’s easy to write, then it isn’t the best thing I can write. The hard things – yes, those are the true works of a musical genius!” But that’s not true at all! Sometimes it’s the simplest things that strike into the heart the deepest.
With that in mind, God kind of knocked me upside the head and said, “Now, Ryan, just stop trying so hard. Write whatever comes naturally to you. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t, but at least write something. Try to be okay with doing the simple things.”
So I sat down, in my bedroom, with my guitar, and I wrote. This song was the outpouring of that day: