How Bob Dylan Helped Me Handle Wildfires
“Well, you must leave now, take what you need, you think will last. Buy whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.”
My daughter marveled at the uncanny timing of Bob Dylan’s lyrics piping into her ears through her headset. We had just packed up the car with pictures, birth certificates and our animals to flee the fire and smoke from our Northeast Los Angeles home.
For the last few months the same song, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, had been haunting me. It’s always been one of my favorite Dylan pieces, but it’s taken on new meaning recently as I explore personal and professional changes. The song is about death and rebirth; about life’s cycles and the need to face reality and make progress in the context of a changing order.
Here we were facing our own reality. Flames had started to ravage our community. Unsure about where things were heading, we knew that things we were used to had been irrevocably changed.
Dylan wrote this song at a pivotal point in his career, released as the closing track on the 1965 Bringing it All Back Home album. The album’s A side features a full band accompaniment with electric guitar, representing the break from traditional folk music that would be made explicit three months later at the Newport Folk Festival (and gorgeously recreated in last year’s Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown).
At Newport, Dylan famously opened the set with a full band with piercing electric guitars. He and the band are booed off stage, but Dylan is eventually implored back for a solo acoustic set. He obliges and sings Baby Blue alone with guitar and harmonica as fans had been accustomed to seeing him thus far in his career.
The song selection is no accident.
For whatever reason, Dylan knew that he had to embrace his future (and reject the past). He had made his fame in folk music as the musical heir to Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Pete Seeger. The electric guitars were a sonic sundering of that heredity and Baby Blue, while musically similar to his early tunes, was the lyrical apotheosis of this world view. The opening verses are full of images of ending and failure. From “empty-handed painters” and “seasick sailors” to “the lover who has just walked out your door” Dylan paints change and exasperation. Finally, the literal ground beneath the listener’s feet is pulled out when “the carpet too is moving under you.” What Dylan is talking about is death. Maybe not a literal death, but something that is over. It’s less imploring the listener to give up something harmful as much as it’s stating the facts.
It’s all over.
Metaphysical change is constant. Heraclitus told us 2500 years ago that “you can’t step in the same river twice.” So whatever that was for Dylan, it was over. And so it is with us. We are constantly moving on from something that is receding.
Most of us don’t move on. We look back. It’s in our nature to do so. But Dylan ends the song with a call to move forward.
“Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
Yes, and it's all over now, baby blue”
The end reminds us that when we move on there is something else ahead and what we offload (here, our clothes) can be picked up by someone else who needs them (here, the vagabond). The rebirth is available to us, but it’s on us to recognize the reality of our situation.
As I write this it’s been about 4 days since I’ve been home. Outside of LA, we are sharing a place with friends who have lost their home. Over meals with them, I watch them deal with the details of their life and their attempts to try to find a way forward. Has the reality set in for them? How could it?
Right now my community in LA is fighting to pick itself up and start again. This is agonizing and it will take years to replace the destruction. How can we look forward to the future when it seems so empty and bleak?
This wildfire is a horror right now to so many families and businesses. It’s also the absolute truth of the situation. The path recedes and we can’t step in the same river twice.
“Start anew” is all that’s left.
Stephen
Coda: (for the business owner)
This wasn’t much of a “business” post, but I’m going to attempt to bring it back to our work. A few final points for commercial application follow here:
Change is inevitable. Listen for it.
“What a highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence”
No matter what anyone tells you about the visionary prowess of successful business titans, most of it comes down to luck. Right place. Right time. Even Warren Buffet remarked to Barack Obama in The Audacity of Hope, “I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing — and make a lot of money doing it.”
Take what you have gathered from coincidence.
Most of us walk into a networking opportunity and look for the people we think are “important.” We look at customer prospects with a pre-set qualification worksheet. The reality is we don’t know what will spark our next product, strategy or success. Recall Steve Jobs’ Stanford graduation speech when he spoke about a random calligraphy class in college being the basis of his understanding of fonts in the Mac’s word processing programs. Open your mind to what is happening right now and be present in your day, instead of letting the past (which is gone) dictate the future.
2. Don’t mourn the market forces
Are you sitting on a product that can’t gain traction? Have you received customer feedback that you don’t like and prefer to ignore? This is tough stuff. Maybe it’s time to see that it’s over (Baby blue)? Years ago, I had a nonprofit that was my sole professional passion. I worked side hustles to afford to keep the mission going and eventually scrapped together enough to hire a PT Program Manager. But I kept hitting wall after wall of market challenges. My wife, understanding both of the entrepreneurial and consulting sides of my mind, challenged me by asking, “If you were consulting on your nonprofit from the outside, what would you say to you?”
I told myself that it was over (because it was).
Surround yourself with advisors as strong as my wife (good luck!). You need someone who can tell you the truth about the reality you are facing. But the end will bring a new beginning…
3. The future is always bright.
Dylan lyrics are contemplative and inflammatory. They are decidedly not rosy or pollyannaish. Yet there is hope in this tune for the future. The final verse has, “something calls for you.”
What’s calling you out?
Remember that when we speak of “vocation” we are using the latin grandchild of “vocare.” Your job should be a calling. Most people who have noted this point tend to focus on the idea that you should feel inspiration or meaning in your work. Sure, but that comes and goes as everything is ephemeral.
Instead, remember that the work you do is to focus on what is calling out.
What market forces are coming and asking you to change? How does your company need to grow? Is it a new product or business unit? Is it by killing a failed business? The dead won’t follow you. It’s okay.
Start anew.
