good morning all.
Everywhere you look right now there is noise. War news, political shouting, endless commentary from people who seem determined to out-dramatize each other. The television panels look like theater companies performing The Tragedy of the Week, and the internet echoes it all back at us twenty-four hours a day.
After a while it becomes hard to concentrate on anything sensible. Even songwriting can feel impossible when the atmosphere is thick with crisis.
But there’s something important to remember.
The world has always been noisy.
If you look back through history you will find the same thing again and again: wars, rumors of wars, political factions shouting, people predicting the end of everything. Yet at the very same time, quietly and without much publicity, somebody was painting a picture, somebody was writing a melody, somebody was building a violin or baking bread or carving a statue.
Civilization didn’t run on the shouting.
It ran on the quiet work.
The news rarely reports that part. There is no breaking bulletin that says: “Millions of people are living their lives today, raising children, writing songs, cooking dinner, planting gardens, inventing things.” Yet that is what actually keeps the world going.
Artists have a special role in all of this. When the atmosphere fills with noise and panic, the artist’s job is not to shout louder than everyone else. The artist’s job is to keep creating.
A song is a small act of sanity.
A poem is a reminder that the human mind still works.
A painting says, “Look here for a moment — there is still beauty.”
Creation is a way of stepping sideways out of the collective trance.
You can feel this very directly when you sit down to write a song. The moment the melody starts forming, the headlines fade away. You move into a different layer of reality — one where rhythm, harmony, and imagination are more important than the daily shouting match.
In that space something very interesting happens: your mind becomes calm again. The noise loses its grip.
That is why creative work matters so much right now.
The world may be loud, but you don’t have to live inside the noise. You can build a quieter world with a guitar, a piano, a sketch pad, a camera, or even just a notebook and a pencil.
And once you start doing that, something else appears.
The joy of making things.
While the television insists that everything is falling apart, people everywhere are still writing songs, telling stories, inventing games, designing jewelry, painting pictures, cooking good meals, and sharing ideas with friends.
In other words, civilization is still alive and well.
The shouting will pass. It always does.
But the songs people write today may still be around a hundred years from now.
So if the news has you distracted or discouraged, try a small experiment. Turn off the noise for a while and make something — a tune, a poem, a sketch, anything at all.
You may discover that the creative world is a much better place to live than the one on the evening news.
And who knows?
The song you write today might be exactly the one somebody else needs to hear.
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Here’s the Bardo bus now!
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