Jonesing on Letting Go
Finding the freedom to live a life you love through gratitude
Quincy Jones was by any stretch of the imagination a GOAT: his career as composer, arranger, and producer spanned over seven decades, gamechanging jazz to pop to soundtracks. Perhaps best known for Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the charity song We Are the World, he won 28 Grammy’s and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.
Dying of pancreatic cancer earlier this month, and enduring health scares since the mid-70s, Quincy spent his final few years reminiscing about his life and career. Like most artists and business people, he’d been reamed, steamed, and dry cleaned by partners, agents, record companies, and the media, weighed down in his senior years by so many axes to grind.
Appreciating his genius and his struggles, I found the video clip shared below refreshing and inspirational. He describes holding all that built-up negativity inside his body, finally learning how to release it. The physicality of feeling is fascinating, and his ability to let it go is a vital lesson everyone needs to master to free ourselves of life’s inevitable karmic burdens.
“I’m discovering a lot of things about myself. you know. I’m trying now, for the last two years, to get all the negative thoughts out of my body. Grudges, no more anger, it’s a waste of time. In Mark Twain’s words, just overwhelming: ‘Anger is an asset which does more harm to the vessel in which it’s stored, than anything on which it’s poured.’ Isn’t it amazing to get to 85 to figure that out? Pretty ridiculous. But you learn it from mistakes.”
Much if not most of what we do is instinctive, programmed into us to improve our species’ chances for survival. Consider a life like Quincy’s, replete with millions of experiences, most of them creative, satisfying, and positively reinforcing. Why filter out and obsess over the miniscule percentage of negative ones? Why fixate on pain, not power?
To Quincy’s own point, we learn. In his enlightened case, he eventually discovers the value of letting go. He could only do that late in ilfe, after the games were already played, likely because prioritizing the negative helped him win the many battles he had to fight. Thanks to Mark Twain and his own good graces, Quincy also realized how to ultimately win the war.
As children, we think everything that happens to us is unique, that we’re the first person in all of human history to experience what has already happened to a hundred billion souls before us. As adults, we tend to feel the same way about our many challenges, assume we somehow got singled out for unfair treatment, getting a bad deal, the short end of the stick.
The truth is none of us is special, each experiencing the good, bad, and ugly of life as we live it. As such we win some and lose some, get shaked and baked along the way, the bigger the meal, the hotter the kitchen. Thanksgiving is a wonderful chance each year to experience and express gratitude. I appreciate Quincy Jones, Mark Twain — and sharing with you.
