Someone to You
[Steven #, the cellist, here] So as you might have guessed, we haven’t been touring lately. It’s safe to say that Covid has thrown us for a “loop.” In nothing short of a miracle, last year, before the pandemic showed up, we had determined as a group to take our first break from touring in 10 years and focus on family during 2020. It might have been the first time our plans actually matched up with our reality.
We love performing. Touring can be grueling. I dread the inevitable tour-induced insomnia. During a recent tour I was determined to make something of my sleeplessness. My friend Devin, who works in an international ancestry research company, inspired me to dig into my family history. With his help, I found a slew of stories -- profound stories of my great great grandfathers and grandmothers and how they overcame an impossible past to make our family’s future possible. In my insomnia, during many late nights on tour, I summarized and rewrote these incredible accounts in first person addressed to my children, so that I could read them as our bedtime stories. That way, my children’s heroes would be their ancestors -- their own kin. The lesson we could learn together was this:
If THEY could do hard things then WE can do hard things too.
Resilience is inheritable.
What does this have to do with this video? Everything.
In this music video, we sped through an eerily empty natural history museum and a public library -- something we could only do during Covid. Why? To prove the same point and send the same message asserted in these bedtime stories. We have grand places like these that you see in this video all throughout our world. They are monuments to human resilience. They house exhibits and shelve books upon books of biographical buoyancy. They showcase hard-earned scientific scenes that serve as the shoulders upon which we stand today -- evidence written into the very fabric of our earth’s crust of how hard things are what we do. We’re built for them. We’re made for them.
And all those that have gone before cry out to us -- wanting to mean something to someone. To be someone to us.
Someone to You.
It’s not as much about WHAT is in our past, but WHO is in our past. Our ancestors stand ennobled by their own grit and perseverance earned through things much harder than what we face, not only to inform our future, but also to endow us with much needed strength for whatever is ahead. They’ve earned our respect, gratitude and our commitment to overcome.
“When our hearts turn to our ancestors, something changes inside us. We feel part of something greater than ourselves.”
If you’ve read this far into the description, you are truly resilient!
If you want to find out more about your own family history, try this link (it’s where I started). https://smarturl.it/TPG_FamilySearch (this video is not sponsored by this website or its company, we only provide it in an attempt to be helpful)
