A Life Story: "Spontane"

I don’t know where to start, but since one has to start somewhere, the urge to write without looking back wins. Otherwise I can’t explain why “Spontane” matters, or push either of us toward the question of whether it could be taken up as a way of living.

As you can see, I don’t have a plan even while writing this. Noticing that we’ve set off together on a trip whose end I don’t really know may be worth more than reading a whole piece and being left with something average. Still, having started, I should finish, so I’ll ask: plans, plans, plans. How long do we keep planning?

I had plans for music too, back when I first got seriously interested in it at university. My songs were supposed to arrive in some full orchestral form. Maybe that’s why I stayed quiet for years. Maybe with a bare voice, or a guitar, I could have got somewhere better in far less time. But no. It was exactly as a friend put it: “Your songs are better than your voice, Ayberk, and that’s what matters.” He said it for years.

Leave aside how good the songs are — nearly all of them have a story, so shouldn’t I be the one telling those stories in my own voice? But how, when my voice isn’t good enough? We weren’t talking about something you improve with practice; we were talking about what people call raw material. And my voice was a long way from being fine cloth. Whether it was cloth at all was open to debate. Since I’m not especially eager to be unfair to myself, I won’t dwell on it.

Sometimes the spontaneous steps we take are the ones that get us to some inner peace by the shortest route. In lives as full of stress as ours, making plan after plan and then watching them fail — mine, for instance — produces disappointments I don’t need to describe. So where do we file sayings like “make your plan and leave the rest to God”? Somewhere in the back of my mind, looking for an answer to that, I should stop stalling and get to the story of the song.

After university I stepped away from music for practical reasons. I came back to it ten years into a corporate career, when a small caravan came into my life. Some time after that restart, wandering through hills and back roads, I wrote “Spontane”. I don’t have the caravan anymore — I had to sell it — but looking back, I’m talking about a song that matters a great deal to me: two whole years lived in that caravan, and a summary of my life.

So what road should I take from here? Is it planning that gets us somewhere, or a spontaneous life? I can see I still haven’t found the answer. Maybe you, reading this, are the ones who can give me the answers I’m looking for on this trip. Either way, welcome to my site. I hope you find something of yourself in this blog.