Happy

This started as a Tweet then grew into a Facebook post before finding its way over here to the long form.

I just saw a wonderful interview with Pharrell Williams on CBS Sunday Morning. After detailing Pharrell's hard-won recent rise to super-stardom, interviewer Anthony Mason tried to get the performer to take some credit for his success and acknowledge that his choices as an artist were as much calculation as they were instinct, given his long career of excellence as a songwriter and producer that went largely unnoticed by all but industry insiders. Pharrell would have no part of it; and without letting on whether he spoke of faith or fate or the elegant randomness of the universe, Pharrell answered:

When you start trying to figure out what you're the best at, that's when you become delusional, 'cause you start to believe that... You see people spin out of control like that all the time, don't you? Those are the most tragic stories, the most gifted people who start to believe it's really all them. It's not all you. It can't be all you. Just like you need air to fly a kite. It's not the kite. It's the air.

Perhaps what they were working toward but never quite reached was the notion that to ride the wave, to take advantage of that moment when the "planets align" as he put it, one has to have made the choice to be fully present, a choice we have to make over and over again, at least every day. If we don't do that, if we choose to find comfort in lying to ourselves and rationalize our pasts, if we blame others for our failures out of a need to maintain our rectitude instead of openly seeking to know specifically how we contributed to what was wrong with what got us to here, then we'll get stuck in it; and I felt like maybe that was what Pharrell was trying to say. It really isn't just the air; each one of us makes choices about how we're going to be that put and keep us in its vicinity. If you can't look hard at your mistakes, you're going to keep making them and miss that air.