What I Learned from Billy Joel

In my last years of high school (when I was around 16-17 years old), I discovered Billy Joel’s music more deeply. Most people know about Uptown Girl and Piano Man, but he has performed such a great range of music that these are just scratching the surface. Today, I would like to review what I learned from listening to Billy Joel’s music.

My Life

This was probably the song I listened to most during high school. The message of My Life is quite simple. The people around you will try to guide you in this or that direction, but you must forge your own path at the end of the day. You are the one who must live with your decisions, not someone else.

Many things in life can be learned quite easily, but they are not truly grasped until you experience the message in many different ways. In listening to this over and over, I felt energized through the music. It felt refreshing to see that I was going to figure out my own life, however easy or hard this may be, and at the end of the day, I would be responsible for my own choices.

I think I just longed to be fully free and on my own, even though I had no idea what that would truly mean. With that freedom, whatever mistakes I may make, I would make them and get through them, and this was just a natural consequence of living out my own life. I would rather make my own mistakes than make someone else’s, trying to live out their dream.

Big Shot

Another song I listened to many times was Big Shot. Basically, this is about the dangers of always needing to appear to be better than everyone else. This song made me think about how we often worry too much about what other people think. Then in caring too much about this, we want to impress them so that they think we are greater than we actually are. We tend to become obsessed with having the appearance of greatness rather than actually attaining greatness.

Since this song showcases the dangers of trying to be too much of a big shot, I realized it was much better to be humble and to strive to be whatever it is I wanted to be, rather than to go for it for the sake of appearing to be something. To do that would only lead to emptiness.

This is not a lesson that is gathered all at once, but one that can be arrived at by listening to this song over and over, by contemplating the message, and by reflecting on one’s own life motivations. Are you doing what you do for the credit? For the positive reactions, you expect to get? Or because it actually matters to you?

All About Soul

This song indicates some deeper feeling that we sometimes can get if we find the right partner (or perhaps a bond that could happen with anyone). We may arrive at a point where we can sense things in each other without the need for words to express them. You may sense trouble, or emotions, or even a deep need that someone has.

Again, as I was 16-17 years old when I listened to this song, this was quite a deep message to me. I had always thought we needed things to be explicit and openly stated for them to be real. Yet here, Billy Joel was hinting at the idea that there was a deeper, more profound, intuitive way of knowing.

Listening to this song made me realize that it could be worthwhile to explore this deeper soul or deeper feeling that perhaps we all have. In general, this may be something that we haven’t properly explored or even developed.

We Didn’t Start the Fire.

I heard a legend somewhere that an American History teacher told his students to forget about the class textbook. Rather, they could learn everything stated in the song We Didn’t Start the Fire, and with this, they should get a good grade on the final exam. I wish I had had that teacher – I may have actually learned something.

Much of the era he is describing in We Didn’t Start the Fire happened before I was born, and so I never did get all of the references, but still, I found the song fascinating. You can’t help but get the message that there have always been tremendous problems throughout history and likely always will be.

If you don’t know your history, it’s easy to feel like you are in a unique position that has never happened in all of human history. And of course, part of this is true, as there is always something new happening. Yet much of what is already happening is just recycled and pops up in a modified form. It’s new, but it’s still old.

Perhaps it’s true we didn’t start the fire, but it seems we will all keep it burning.

Pressure

I did not give this song much of my focus until I got to college. Pressure is not the most aesthetically pleasing song out there, but what is interesting to me is that the song itself does brilliantly capture the feeling of being pressured near your breaking point and being fully overwhelmed.

When the pressure is so great, and you don’t know what to do, how can you handle it?

The main message here is that we can run or do whatever we want to get away from the pressure, but it will find us nonetheless. The best we can do is learn to manage our own feelings about it. There comes a time when there is no other way but to get through it on your own. Personally, I have found that there is great value in learning to get through the pressure. It’s always there or ready to pop up somehow, so this is something we have to learn to deal with.

Other Songs

There are other songs that I listened to many, many times and that left some impression on me, but I don’t have too much to say about them. I’m not sure how to put in words the lessons or impressions that I gathered from them. Nothing beats just listening.

Those songs are Keeping the Faith, Only the Good Die Young, Tell Her About It, Piano Man, She’s Always a Woman, Just the Way You Are, and Allentown. Sometimes I just liked the song. Sometimes I may have gathered a different message than he intended. Sometimes I may have just absorbed the feeling, and it didn’t matter the words used.

By the way, I purposely didn’t mention any lyrics for legal reasons. Also, if you are interested in understanding what I have said here more deeply, I fully recommend listening to the songs on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen to your music.

Latent Creative Energy

I never considered myself to be artistic or creative. It took me a very long time to realize that I had creative energy within me. Most people think they don’t have this, but I think we all had it. We were all born with impressive and creative powers that gradually were lost.

As a young child, I was afraid of my own creative abilities. I didn’t realize that my mind would make things up that were not there. Many children are afraid of the dark, but I was afraid of actual beings and monsters that followed me in the darkness. They were actual, in the sense that my mind created the vivid imagery based on the amorphous, uncertain shapes that hovered in the dark.

Like a Rorschach test (old inkblot image psychological tests where you can see anything in your subconscious through them), the darkness was all a grand Rorschach in my mind, and anywhere I looked, beings and monsters followed. At four years old, I saw Superman fly right by my side, but I was not happy with this. I was scared because he flew too close to me. I didn’t want him to fly into me and knock me over.

As a young child, I could not control my creative energy. These beings, structures, and monsters followed me everywhere in the darkness. I wanted them to go away, but they would not. Through the years, they faded bit by bit. Finally, around 12 years old, they were almost completely gone. I was happy. I was free from their terrors.

Now I wonder, perhaps a big chunk of my creativity was gone with it too. Where did it go? No one knows. As an adult, in the darkness, I see darkness. I can’t see beings and monsters anymore, even if I try.

Where did the creativity go? For a long time, I was lost in the idea that there was a right and wrong way to do things. Buying into this limited me greatly. I began to search for the right answers everywhere, not understanding that the single right way was a mirage. Usually, a problem can be solved in 10 or 20 different ways in the real world. There is no one right way.

Even in art class, the teachers taught us a system, a single right way to produce the type of art they wanted us to make.

One time in the 5th grade, the assignment was to draw a girl's face in our class extremely fast. We were supposed to learn to produce a general idea of an image quickly, even if it was not perfect. The goal was to outline, not reproduce.

I failed to understand this assignment, and instead, I drew incredibly slowly, trying to capture every detail from this girl’s face. I kept looking at my paper and back at her to try to make sure the shapes were all right, that she was properly represented in my drawing.

“We are waiting on you,” the teacher looked at me desperately, as everyone else had finished.

Normally I cared about what the teachers told me, but for some reason, that day, I didn’t care.

What was the point of working on art if I couldn’t do it my way?

I continued, trying to capture everything in painstaking detail.

The teacher looked at me with disapproval, telling me that I was missing the point of the assignment.

A moment later, she moved along to some other task for the class, but I kept working on the drawing, trying to get it right.

I had been taught all my life up to then that there was a right answer for everything. Surely, the right way to make this drawing was to make sure that girl’s actual face could be captured on my page. I saw now that I had to consider the lighting, her expression, what she was feeling even.

I was always a good student, but somehow this task was more important now than all the other classes and facts the teachers had tried to shove into my head.

If I could get this drawing to match up with her face like a picture, perhaps I could show that all my learning had been worth something.

Finally, the class bell rang, and I had barely managed to finish my drawing.

A few students passed by me with remarks such as:

“Wow, that is pretty good,” and “I didn’t know someone in this class could draw.”

The truth was I didn’t know how to draw – I never drew anything, but I just wanted to get it right.

After that, I forgot about art. It left a distaste in me that the teacher had pressured me to do it her way. I decided that, just as with most other classes, this wasn’t worth caring about. I was a sort of zombie student, doing what needed to be done, but not really personally invested in it.

In 9th grade, my English teacher asked us to write some poems. I didn’t have a creative bone left in me, and the girl sitting behind me told me it was easy. She actually wrote me a couple of poems as a favor, and I would take the credit. I was relieved. I really liked that teacher, and I wish I had given poetry a shot then.

In 12th grade, I randomly decided that I wanted to play the piano. Something was drawing me to it. I really liked Billy Joel and couldn’t get enough of his music. And one of his most famous songs is Piano Man. Maybe that had something to do with it.

My instructor was some prodigy who went to college at 14 years old and had traveled the world giving concerts. He ended up settling on a vocation in real estate and teaching students like me in his spare time. I spent a few months learning piano with him. Then, he told me something I had not expected. He told me that I was playing in a way that often took people four years of lessons to get to. After that, I went to college to focus on serious matters and mostly left the piano behind.

I would return to the piano in the summers, learning to play songs from video games, like Phantom Forest, from Final Fantasy 6 (from a popular video game series). Such melodies gave me comfort, and I felt that I could connect more deeply to some feeling that I was perhaps feeling at that time.

I also began writing poetry fervently. I was always looking for inspiration for my next poem. Perhaps some were bad, but I think some were okay, some were actually good. I was in college then, but perhaps similarly as with the drawing of the girl in the 5th grade, I began to feel that these poems were the real work. All of those classes I took were just for a degree, but the writing was what actually mattered. Something had pained me in those years. Honestly, I don’t even remember what, and I suppose poetry was a way to express that feeling.

Then I went to graduate school and had no time for silly things like being creative. Ironically, my research focus was creativity and innovation. This was serious work. I went to class, conducted studies, wrote research papers, went to research meetings and more meetings, presented my research, and so on. There was no time to be creative. Eventually, I left there, and I was motivated to create something.

I began writing poems and short stories. The short stories were often dystopian or absurd.

Again, when I was working on a poem or story, I often had this feeling that this was what truly mattered. Somehow these words on a page and these made-up characters mattered more than other stuff like having a good job, having an intelligent conversation, or acting like an adult.

Then I left it behind and decided to pursue more serious work.

Lately, I have found poetry again, and this somehow seems to get my meaning across better than through my usual writings. I have the feeling again that these poems are what truly matters. If I work at it and get better, perhaps my true message will find its way better through poetry than through my typical ways of communication. We shall see.

When we have creative energy, sometimes we can’t contain it. Where it will take us, nobody knows – but we must let it loose somehow.

Today, I encourage you to look for that creative part of yourself that you thought you had lost. It was always there somewhere waiting for you. Did you always want to create something? Build something? Learn to draw, paint, sing, dance, or write? Why not give it a shot?

Expanding Empathy

It’s important in these times more than ever that we expand our empathy. This means that we should aim to understand what other people are going through, not just on an intellectual level but on the level of emotion and feeling.

Let’s consider what empathy is. It is feeling and knowing what someone else is going through on a deep, emotional, personal level.

At its base level, to empathize, you must ask yourself, have I ever gone through a similar experience as such a person? (e.g., next time you witness suffering, ask yourself this question). Or, to go a bit deeper, you may ask if you can understand what this person is feeling and going through.

If you have had a similar experience, you may possess a natural empathy for this person, as you can easily understand what they are going through. When we consider family and close friends, we can empathize somewhat more easily, as we have many shared experiences. We are also much more likely to have either gone through similar pains as them or to have a close connection to their pains just through our close connection with them.

The above forms of empathy are not to be taken for granted, despite that for some people, these sorts of empathy come more naturally. I believe that people should focus first on empathizing with those closest to them to build up their empathy skills. We can always aim to improve our empathic abilities, perhaps by aiming to listen more deeply, to observe body language more closely, or to feel what someone is feeling more deeply.

However, in these times more than ever, we must expand our empathy beyond just our close family and friends to neighbors, strangers, and people who are outside of our affiliations (outside of our religion, race, socioeconomic status, etc.). This is a challenge, but one that will pay great dividends for society.

Particularly, I would like to emphasize that those in power should empathize more with those who have less power. Those of a dominant or predominant class should empathize more with those not in a dominant class. Men should empathize more with women, and people with access to great wealth and resources should empathize more with those who do not have these things. A key reason for this suggestion is to restore balance in society. Those who are powerless are forced to understand powerful people as they run the world. Those who are minorities are forced to understand the predominant groups as they run the world. Women are forced to understand men, as historically, the world has been run by them. We should come to understand the inherent privilege and perhaps injustice in this, and those in the predominant or dominant classes should take a moment from their days regularly to consider life from another angle.

Much of the pain and suffering in this world may arise just from those in minority or less privileged groups feeling that they are not heard, taken seriously, or seriously considered – that they are just invisible and irrelevant, which is one of the worst feelings a person could have. In reality, all sides should empathize with each other more, but it will help restore balance when the highly privileged work to empathize with the less privileged.

We should learn that empathy is a key step for us to take actions that help one another. Those who fail to empathize will see no reason to take such actions, of course. When we do learn to empathize more deeply, we will be prepared to build better societies for ourselves and our families.

On your journey to expanding your empathy, first aim to empathize with yourself (treat yourself with love and kindness, and not just judgment), then your nuclear family, extended family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, strangers like you, strangers unlike you (e.g., with different backgrounds and worldviews), then to animals you are familiar with, then to animals you are unfamiliar with, then to all life, then to all nonlife, then to all.

At the final stages of expanding your empathy, you will see yourself in everyone. You come to understand that there are only so many emotions or combinations of them, and we are all capable of having them. When you see yourself in everyone, you will do your best to help everyone who walks into your life, as if it were your brother or sister or even yourself.

To the practical person who thinks these are nice thoughts, but we cannot help and save everyone, I would say that my focus is on getting us to progress in stages. Progress doesn’t happen overnight but in gradual stages. It is up to us to choose that journey of improvement for ourselves.

Here are some techniques we can use to begin to expand our empathy as communities:

• When you see suffering, take a moment to consider what this person is going through deeply. Imagine what their day may have been like. Then from there, imagine what their whole life may have been like.

• Read or listen to first-hand stories written from the minority or oppressed perspective. This means that the author should be a minority or oppressed, or the author should at least have interviewed such people.

• Read historical accounts that honestly try to understand the perspective of minority and oppressed peoples – this may include looking into Native American history, African American history, Hispanic American history, the history and struggles of women, etc.

• Try to make a meaningful human connection with someone outside your socioeconomic status, with different world views, a different religion, etc. Do not feel the need to convince them or to be convinced of anything. Just open your mind and learn why and how this person is the way he is.

• Watch international movies or movies directed by people from different backgrounds and cultures. This may involve watching movies with subtitles.

• Learn another language – if you try to learn and study a language seriously, you will learn directly what it is like to be the outsider, the one who feels foolish, does not understand, and is sometimes mistreated. Imagine visiting another country and only speaking their language in a broken/basic way. This is a humbling experience.

• Listen to music from other cultures and regions, perhaps some that is in another language. If it is in another language, look up what the lyrics mean.

When you successfully expand your empathy, you will become interested in engaging in more community acts of kindness.