Some of us have what I like to call theme songs.Your theme song may blare from your speakers while you're driving home late from work, momentarily distracting you from the traffic, or wonderfully and unexpectedly from the jukebox in your favorite pub after you've had a few beers....they may completely change your mood altogether or allow you to sink deeper into whichever ocean of revelry (or reverie) you've been dipping your toes into. Music is generous this way.
I'm chuckling as I admit that my theme song is and has been for years The Pretenders "Brass in Pocket." As soon as it comes on it always seems to inject me with a rush of courage and nerve, makes me a little more brave, and when I recognize that this song does that to me, I laugh, and thus the whole thing comes right 'round again..because I am laughing and feeling pretty good about myself. This brings to mind the notion of confidence. This month, I will be able to say that I have under my belt one whole year of living/surviving in Los Angeles, and that confidence has been something that I have thought a lot about. How to get it... how to keep it. I have learned many times this year that confidence is an elusive little shit that comes and goes. You never really have it, more like you experience it... One day you can be on top of your game, feeling great, while the next day, it may have just, well, abandoned you, leaving you empty. How can that be?
I want to know where confidence comes from........ Perhaps this will allow me to reconcile the fact that it comes and goes.... that it's not something we get to keep just because we feel it so strongly from time to time..... What makes us feel confident? Does it come from approval in our friendships? New clothes? The advances of men? Being promoted in your job? Creating something beautiful? Being funny? Being smart? Does it come from inside ourselves or does it come from somewhere else? I know these answers vary.......For you, it may come from all of these things or none of them at all.... it may even come from music...from hearing a song that seems like it was written just for you........
I think the trick to it is knowing and understanding the ebb and flow in which confidence resides...know that like the seasons and the stars it will always come back to you if you let it come and go without so much worry or fight. Someone once told me that stress happens when the mind resists what is. Perhaps if we let confidence come and go as it pleases without trying to define it or measure it, then it won't venture out too far....
I feel confident when I know I have been brave. The funny thing is, I find it most difficult to recognize these times of bravery until long after the fact.... the benefits of bravery don't catch up with me until a good while later.....maybe that's why I am so grateful for this song as it gives me an instantaneous boost of confidence that I don't have to wait for.
