“He who ain’t busy born is busy dyin’.” Bob Dylan wrote that line in the mid Sixties and it made the bats and other stuff in the belfry ring out louder for me than ever before in 2025.
This line might have been playing hide and seek for very many years, but having it make any real sense to me didn’t happen until going back and reminding myself of Dylan’s music because of the film “A Complete Unknown”, which is built around a slightly fictionalised version of the storyteller’s arrival in New York.
He’s made his way there to meet his idol- a very ill Woody Guthrie- and then goes about busying himself to create a strong marketable image that would make him the great storyteller that he is and be an interesting enough character to attract an almost cultish audience.
This wasn’t being a fake, but, maybe, when asked at an early press conference what he was or how he would describe himself, he jokingly described himself as a “song and dance man” was him almost auditioning this image. Sometimes, image is pretty much everything.
Was he joking or is there more truth to this answer than we think?
Being a chameleonic song and dance man and morphing into other characters over the years is what has made Bob Dylan become the enigmatic storyteller that he is and which has captivated some of us enough to follow him in the jingle jangle morning of change.
His songs have become part of these changes, because he and the times were and are always a-changing.
Like the times we find ourselves in today, no one stays the same.
These days, I prefer my own company to those of others, where I have to explain myself, though knowing the need to get out and see other life stories unravel along with mine and give me a look into different characters and the lives that they really live and those that they spin.
This is when one is offered a free look into a real life game show as to how much is spinning and how much is real, what might be doing and what is real and what is dying.
It’s separating the wheat from the chaff and understanding how we got to be here and what this Here might be.
Is Here actually here or is it over There?
Are we leaving people once in our lives behind and looking for things and those that still haven’t entered our lives because we were still in the Here clutching onto our security blankets instead of being out There?
Whatever and wherever There is, I think that we really are on the edge of feather and not just expecting to fly, but flying without a safety net and finally being honest with ourselves.
We’re busy being REBORN with new wings.
There’s also this: The old ways and the thinking from way back there appear to have far more answers than what we have been grappling with for the past few decades with none offering anyone any answers in creating a world not filled with superficiality, but only a hunger for riches that are often fool’s gold.
At least for me, it’s about not going to work on Maggie’s farm no more and leaving all those Mr Joneses behind and thinking about those times when you once held mountains in the palm of your hand and rivers that ran through every day, but how you still threw it all away.
Maybe you had to in order to swim against the tide and it was a good thing in order for life to become streamlined and much more clear, because it’s no longer a crapshoot of clutter and voices sounding like a murder of crows.
It’s now about life and how life is worth living, but it must be on your terms and with those who understand you- and you, them.
If not, you’re going nowhere.
If yes, you’re busy being reborn by no longer carrying the weight of deadbeats on the down low and on a sweet chariot that’s not carrying you back home to where it matters.
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