Be careful. You think differently from others that you respect and admire. Your thoughts and ideas are your own and, although you can listen to others, you must distil their ‘good’ ideas through your filter of mind. Watch and learn, do not follow. You are looking at things from your perspective and no one else’s. You cannot be them, however much you would like to be. The scattered chapters of your life are unique. No one else has trodden your path. No one else has your past, your upbringing, your body, your mind. Sometimes it is useful to look at another’s ideas and attitudes and see where that gets them. Looking from the outside can show you something of the shape and consequence of their lives. But you can never see right inside them – that motivating soul, that if listened to, can make a person so whole.

What do others think of you? And can you learn from that? What a disturbing thought! The closer you are to someone, the more they might know something of you, but, and this is an important but, they cannot know all of you. They can give you the advice you ask for but that is only for part of you. The world in general will have a different view of you. They may see you for a moment and may judge you to be this or that and they might be right or wrong in that instant. But that is just a moment, an action. People may know your music and from that they might imagine how you are. Perhaps for fleeting moments of bars and beats, they will understand something of you that you haven’t seen. You create in such a blur sometimes – almost unaware of what you are doing as you live in that moment. Music is funny like that – a river.

So how to be me? Not easy, I’m afraid. And yet it’s there, just behind what you think is you, is you. You are behind the mirror of your life. You swim in the depths of every consciousness, you hear the sound of every bird, you see the light of every star. But you don’t know that, you can’t. It’s all too big.

So be simple.

Be slow.

Be gentle

And know

That

You

Are.