My Birthday Present To You

Today was my 49th birthday. It comes at the end of an interesting month and year for me. Over the last year, I've had the opportunity to reconnect with many relatives and friends. This period of reconnection has intensified in the last month due to my exploration of social networking, specifically Facebook. I have been blessed to find old high school friends, college friends and relatives that I haven't spoken to in decades. It has been a wonderful time in my life as I have caught up with theses long lost pieces of my past.


The past year has also presented its challenges for me as well- professionally, personally and spiritually. At times, the stress and pressure has been much more than I ever thought I could bear. If you were to ask me on any given day how life was treating me, it was better than even money I could find something in my life that was causing me pain to complain about. The cards I've been dealt in the last twelve months have not been the desired ones.


I mention all of this because it's my birthday. Today is a day where I reflect on the last 49 years- the things that I've accomplished and the things that I've dreamed of. For some reason, the process has been much harder for me this year than in the past. I find myself focusing so much on the negatives than the positives. Being one step closer to fifty and no longer a kid by any definition of the word. Closer to having grandchildren than having to find a date for the prom. For the first time in my life, I was facing my biggest fear- growing old.

Earlier this week, I reconnected with a good friend from college. For those of you that didn't know me at that time in my life, I was a musician attending Berklee College of Music in Boston. My entire life revolved around my music. Many people knew me for my performance of music, but my true gift was my ability to write and arrange music. I was a student of the art of painting a picture with sound and I was damn good at it! My "happy place" was alone at the piano with paper available to capture the different moods that traveled through my hands to the keyboard of the piano.

I continued playing through my twenties, more for my own enjoyment than anything else. I put my music away when I got married the first time. In my mind, I now had a family to be responsible for and that task left no room for personal indulgence. I was making the mature decision. Or at least I thought I was.

Earlier, I mentioned reconnecting with an old college friend. In getting caught up, she asked if I was still in the music industry. I told her my story, that I had continued for a few years after I got out of college, but that I wasn't doing much anymore, just some writing. You see, every few years ever since I "put the music away", I go through a period of a few months where I find myself back at the keyboard, creating new pictures and aural images. These periods run their course and then I go back to my corporate and family life. I can't predict these periods and I can't force them to happen- they just do. Typically they come in response to unbearable stress in my life. I believe they help me process and cope with the stress.

Why is this important? Because of that conversation I realized that I never stopped being a musician. I may have denied myself the personal recognition of what I was, but my mind found its opportunities to remind me of what I am (not what I was). My fingers certainly aren't as nimble as they once were, but my mind is still capable of creating beautiful things. I was, am and will always be a musician. And this realization has made me realize that for all of the bad in my life, incredibly good things surround me. By looking at the world through the artistic eyes I used for the first thirty years of my life, I was able to see that growing old does not have to be painful. It can be an uplifting experience as long as you don't place limits on yourself. Be the person you were intended to be, not the person that you think the world wants you to be.So, now to the gift part. Not much remains of the music I wrote all those years ago. However, the influx of PC's into our lives has allowed me to capture portions of the last couple of writing spurts I've experienced. Not since my college days have I openly shared my music with more than a couple of people. My music has been an extremely private thing to me and I’ve been reluctant to share it with anyone. I've decided to change all of that.

The internet is a wonderful tool. It allows me to share my music with anybody reading this blog. Go to http://ilike.com and type my name (Scott Stephenson) into the search box. The results will give you seven different short songs that I’ve written and recorded over the last eight years. They are all very rough recordings- I don’t have access to the session musicians and multi-channel recording studios that were available to me twenty five years ago. These were all recorded in my family room over the years and are not what I would consider to be “professional quality” recordings. They are simply quick snippets of the art form that God blessed me with.

So here it is, my present to you. It is also a symbol of my recognition that maybe age really is a mind thing. Thank you Cheryl, my old college friend, for making me realize this.