OK universe. I get it. You can stop yelling at me. Message received.

This week it seems wherever I turn I keep receiving cosmic messages. Maybe I’m just opening up so wide that things are getting in. Maybe I’m just full of myself and it’s all coincidence. Whatever.

I wanted to write about something else today, but I can’t. I tried. I wrote several drafts about other things, but this has been screaming at me. It kept me tossing and turning all night. So, with only a few hours sleep, I’m being forced to type this.

Last night I saw a musical unlike any I’ve seen before. Everyone should see it. LIKE NOW. I want to buy tickets for my kids, my friends, strangers on the street. Everyone.

“Billy Elliot” is more than just about a boy that wants to dance. It’s more than stellar dancing, amazing lighting and sets. Oh, it’s so much more.

There is a grandmother. She is suffering from dementia. Billy asks her about granddad. “Do you remember him?” She does. And the song she sings had me doing that laughing/crying thing. Here’s the part that killed me:

What is the use of dreaming now?
I had my chance, well anyhow,
If I’d only known then what I know now
I’d’ve given them all the finger

And gone dancing, and not give a shit
and spin around and reel and love each bit
And I’d dance alone and enjoy it
And I’d be me for an entire life.
Instead of somebody’s wife
and I never would be sober.

Heavy. Driving home at midnight from downtown it hit me that I’m almost 40. Am I having a mid-life crisis already? What the hell?? I started asking myself, what would you do if you had no constraints? If nothing could stop you? If you were free?

Too much right. Let’s shelve those for a minute and talk about Billy. In one scene he is auditioning for a dancing school. He is asked how he feels when he dances. Here’s just a bit:

It’s a bit like being angry,
it’s a bit like being scared
Confused and all mixed up and mad as hell
It’s like when you’ve been crying
And you’re empty and you’re full
I don’t know what it is, it’s hard to tell
It’s like that there’s a music playing in your ear
But the music is impossible, impossible to hear
But then I feel it move me
Like a burning deep inside
Something bursting me wide open impossible to hide
And suddenly I’m flying, flying like a bird
Like electricity, electricity
Sparks inside of me
And I’m free I’m free

Crazy, right? And then I asked myself, what makes me feel like that? What could bring me to such passion and heights of joy? Is there such feelings in the real world, or does is only exist in musical land?

The answers aren’t here yet. They are coming. But it’s the questions that are screaming at me. It’s these questions that keep coming and probably will. They are leading me somewhere, but that place is unclear. But I have to ask them. It’s time to focus on them. It’s time to start living for myself and not just others. It’s time to find passion and feel it and be free.

Shit.