Life's Serenade

Theme song: Sacrificial by Rezz, PVRIS

For the past few years, once a year, I hike a slot canyon in southern Utah. It's become a tradition for me to go to this slot canyon and bring friends to camp for the weekend and experience the beauty of the lesser known canyon. Last year, while sitting down and enjoying the view, a friend asked me to serenade the group with zero pretext. I declined at that point in time but for some reason that experience came to mind this year during the hike. I had a question that needed to be answered. What is the word for a person who loves to be serenaded by life? A word that means "one who loves to be serenaded?"

My group couldn't think of a word so I took it upon myself to create one. I wanted to create a word that not only captured my love of life and determination to be serenaded endlessly by it, but a word that also speaks to my siren song. After some deliberation and much laughter from my friends, more at me than with me, I landed on a word to describe my desire to be serenaded constantly.

My word for "one who loves to be serenaded" is scerenepter.

I landed on this word as a combination of scepter, the basis of the pseudo name of this blog, and serenade. A scepter to me symbolizes wisdom and authority. In this context the wisdom referred to is the wisdom of life, whether it be learned from nature, people, books, or any other medium. I choose to learn from everything because everything has something to teach me, a critical part of my life's serenade. This is a mentality I've recently chosen for myself, not something I've embodied for the vast majority of my life, and it's been amazing. Authority refers to my own authority, the authority to make my own choices and be a co-creator in the beauty that is my existence. I can't choose everything that life throws at me, but I can choose the experience that I create from it.

Paulo Coelho's book, The Alchemist, speaks about this concept extensively throughout its woven, wisdom-laced allegory. It describes a boy who chooses to go after his personal treasure, his purpose, and how his life has taught him exactly what he needed, when he needed it, to enable him to reach his goal. His innate desire to learn from all of his experiences was paramount in him realizing his vision. He learned from animals, his profession of being a shepherd, being a foreigner in a strange land, getting robbed, being a worker in a glass shop, from the desert, from those with more knowledge than him, from following his intuition, from the alchemist himself, from near death experiences, and from his own power and determination. In no instance did he choose not to learn and he never gave up his dream.

The myth of the siren comes to mind, the bane of sailors, a humanoid creature whose voice is so alluring that sailors readily abandon their entire life and common sense in order to find the source of the serenade. Seems like an archetype of the subconscious mind that highlights the power and enchantment of following one's dreams, but with the indictment that doing so will only lead to catastrophic, life-ending failure, an all too common fear-based warning of impending doom embedded in most of our mythology. Why are the outcomes in our mythos so often fear based? What if those that followed the voices lived the best fucking life ever because they followed their intuition? I guess that doesn't make for a good story to most people, but it makes the absolute ideal story to me.

The Alchemist discusses the power of beliefs in the outcomes of the characters of the story. One such character has a dream to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, but doesn't believe that he ever will, even after his crystal shop transforms from one of the least successful in the city to the most successful thanks to Santiago's (the protagonist's) refusal to relinquish his dream and submit to life's setbacks. Even after he had the means, he still didn't believe in his potential to fulfill his dreams. The book mentioned how some people want their dreams but don't believe they're possible and stay complacent as a result.

A week after reading this book I happened to be with some friends and a girl was talking about how she was a horse girl, but a horse girl can't ever own horses. What??? Right in front of me was a real life example of what the book was describing. A person who loved something with all her heart but refused to even consider it as a potential part of her future, much less a person who would work to make her dream a reality.

Later that night I met another person who wanted to build her art business. She asked others how she could make it successful. We discussed it briefly and I mentioned that I'd love to help her and would enlist people I knew to help as well. She agreed and I messaged her my number asking for additional information and inviting her to meet my friends who could help her dream become reality. She never texted me back. She was different from the last example because she at least voiced that she wanted to reach her dreams, but she was unwilling to put in minimum work to maximize her chances of success. Her words and her actions weren't congruent. How could she truly claim that she wanted her business to be successful when she snubbed possible chances to make it so?

Spirituality argues that in order to attract what you want, you have to be singularly minded in achieving that thing. There can be no doubt, no fear, no hesitation, no second guessing, and no misalignment, consciously or subconsciously, in your desire to achieve your goals. Then, and only then, will your dreams become reality. The power of belief as a principle of spirituality cannot be overemphasized.

In the book, The Vision, by Tom Brown Jr., the author describes his experience of growing up under the tutelage of his Native American grandfather and the wisdom he gained from being willing to challenge his belief systems. He describes how he learned to push the boundaries of what most people would consider possible in all aspects of survival, from running endlessly on hot summer days without water by using his mind to prevent his body from sweating to using his mind to make himself sweat while sitting naked outside in the dead of snowy winter. He talks about the lessons he's learned from choosing to belief in the impossible and choosing to persevere in the face of adversity. He says that some of his greatest lessons have been learned when he chose forward momentum instead of wallowing in his own misfortune and misery.

I have recently undertaken my own quest in addition to learning from everything. I am choosing to learn to love everything. This is a monumental task for those that know me as I have always been pretty particular about my interests. I make no effort to hide when I dislike an activity, music, a meal, etc. because I value authenticity above nearly anything. But I've chosen to change. I refuse to put myself in a box about what I am capable of, including my own interests. That doesn't mean that I will fill my time with everything that doesn't speak to me intrinsically, but it does mean that I will find value in it and learn to appreciate it.

So here I am. Writing a post on my choice to learn to be serenaded by everything that is, the choice to find value in everything. A scerenepter.

As scerenepter isn't an actual word, except to me obviously, I think that a fun experiment would be to see what others come up with as the word to describe how they like to be serenaded by life. Scerenepter is my word. Create your own. And post it in the comments! I'd love to see what people come up with.