The best you can do is the best you can do

When we stop asking questions and decide we know the answers, we stop growing, we stop learning, and we stop living. It’s not so scary not knowing. It’s an enormous universe, and arrogance would be required to conclude we’ve figured it out. I have been arrogant and I have been humble, and let me say humble feels more natural. Humble feels more honest. Humble feels more true. Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the arrogant.”

Did I climb out of bed and start the coffee before 4 a.m., just to write one sure honest paragraph? I look at what I’ve written so far, and a small voice wants to say, “That’ll do.” But we were not born to settle for what will do. We are better than “that’ll do.” When we approach our final destination, “That’ll do” won’t do.

Lord, help me live a life that’s more than “that will do.” Let me be able to say, “I did my best.” Laurels came to me, and I tried not to rest on them. I tired, and I may always question if I stopped to rest too soon. Could I have earned a brighter trophy if I ran a little faster or a little longer, or did I wring every last drop of sweat from my body?

What more could I do? What more can I do? Those are relevant questions. The road still lies ahead, the race is not done, the heart still beats, the lungs still fill and filter and empty.

Here in the stillness before dawn, the sleeping dog snoring over my shoulder, I feel so willing and I feel so daunted. My body is old and tires easily; I am trying to muster the discipline to maintain it in better condition. This earthly vessel could fail at any moment, but it has not yet. My mind could grow dull, or a stroke could fell it, but neither has happened yet.

I would tell my colleagues who were concerned about pending layoffs and other matters beyond our control, “The best you can do is the best you can do until you can’t.” I used to say “until they tell you that you can’t,” but they only had the power to say you can’t act in their name anymore. They don’t have the power to take away your ability or your skills.

The best I can do is the best I can do until I can’t. It’s hard to accept that a day will come when I can’t anymore, but that’s because that day has not yet come. We’ll see if I can accept it when that day comes; we like to believe we’ll accept it with grace, although we also like to believe we will rage against the dying of the light.

Now I hear the first birdsong of this morning; dawn is coming. Creation has matters to attend. Time to rise, shine and give God the glory. I feel assured that for one morning, rising before dawn, I accomplished what I set out to do in this space. Now the challenge is resist the impulse to set the rest of the day aside and say, “That’ll do.”

Singin’ dem ol’ Summer Solstice Blues

I have made my fondness for the summer solstice as clear as can be. Officially, summer begins in these parts at precisely 3:24 a.m. today.

I love when the sun rises at 5:05 a.m. If I had my way, we would not “spring ahead” and the sun would rise at 4:05 a.m. today. I don’t care when the sun sets; most days I’m tired by then anyway.

We are scheduled to have about 15 and a half hours of daylight today. I am very fond of daylight.

The reason I’m singin’ dem ol’ Summer Solstice Blues is that starting tomorrow, the day will be a few seconds shorter. This, this day right here, is the longest day of the year. Next thing you know — well, on Sept. 22 — we’ll have 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night — and on Dec. 21 we’ll have 15 and a half hours of nighttime. Fooey on that stuff.

The forecast says that the sun will be shining for much of the morning and it will get cloudier as the afternoon progresses, but I don’t care. It’s the summer solstice, and the distance between sunrise and sunset is the farthest it’s going to be in 2026, and that’s good enough for me.

On second thought, never mind the blues, they can wait until December. Let’s celebrate all this daylight.

Nitty Gritty curtain call

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band played the last concert of their Farewell Tour on Thursday night in Denver. Sixty years later, pushing 80 years old, they’ve decided to sell the tour bus. It sounds like they are not giving up music, just the nomadic life. We do have a need to call some place “home” and settle there when our roaming days are done. “Sit. Rest a spell.”

Part of me wishes they would keep the name alive. Maybe it’s just because I’m a fan boy, but “The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band” has come to mean more than the four, five or six musicians who play the music at any given time. The Glenn Miller Orchestra is still touring, the Lovin’ Spoonful plans to play Green Bay next week, etc. — if they are true to the sound, why not? I would not be offended if Jaime Hanna and Ross Holmes, the “young’uns” in the current lineup, maintained the name.

I hope someone captured the night with a worthy recording. I do see a camera guy or two wandering the stage in the YouTube videos that have emerged from Thursday night. Or maybe the memory is enough — scattered around the universe are people who were there in 1966 when a bunch of kids took a stage in California and started to play some old-time music, but that first show itself is tucked away in their hearts. 

The group probably thought “The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band” was an appropriately goofy name for those silly old songs, and maybe they started out making fun of songs like “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” but somewhere along the line they began to respect the music — or maybe they respected it all along.

I know they taught generations to respect the music, especially through their legendary Will The Circle Be Unbroken project that celebrated traditional country, or bluegrass, or Americana, whatever you want to call it. They have always found amazing songs and amazing songwriters — for example, Uncle Charlie and His Dog Teddy in 1970 features four songs by a young man named Kenny Loggins, who went on to make a bit of a name for himself.

They set out to honor the legends of the genre and grew to become legends themselves. I’ve attended more concerts by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band than any other artist, and they have not just aged gracefully, they get better all the time.

You never know, when you first turn your head and pay attention, where something might lead. Back in 1967 I heard a song called “Buy For Me the Rain” coming out of a transistor radio, and something connected and made me listen. Nearly 60 darn years later, they still have my attention, an unbroken circle.