By age 16 Janis Ian was already a household name in the pop music world. Her social commentary anthem about inter-racial dating Society’s Child shattered the innocence of late 60s rock and roll and vaulted her to the forefront as a spokesman for her generation. She made the cover of countless magazines. Her music was everywhere. No less than classical music icon Leonard Bernstein was singing her praises.
She had fame, money, and freedom to explore all the excesses that came with both. She did so with enthusiasm.
Less than two decades later all that was lost. She owed over a million dollars to the IRS for taxes she thought she had paid but instead had gone into the pocket of an unscrupulous manager. She was penniless. She was relegated to the status of a music trivia question. Unable to find a stage to sing from, abandoned by the pop music audience, and reeling from incredibly poor choices of friends and lovers that left her physically beaten and battered, she was at the end of her rope.
“I have never been so depressed in my life,” she writes in her autobiography, Society’s Child, “Life was over. Why bother going on?”
With all hope seemingly lost, she turned one last time to the one thing she knew. She picked up her guitar and began plucking out a melody. Thoughts began to form.
She wrote one line, “On days like these, when the rain won’t fall”. Then she followed with another, “and the sky is so dry that even birds can’t call.”
As she wrote an even more important, more compelling thought than any song lyric she had written came to mind.
She recalled something a friend had told her years before, that no matter what happens in life “there is always a choice”. Those words would galvanize her will and start her on the journey back.
“I was only thirty-seven,” Ian recalled, “My circumstances sucked, but maybe I was still young enough to rise above them…at the least, I could try to figure a way out.”
The fighting spirit within her rose in her consciousness. She determined not to give up. That song, Days Like These, marked her first step back.
At that moment and with that choice she embraced a truth that is essential to anyone who yearns to live life with grace, purpose, and passion.
“I knew that until the day I died, my dreams and my talent would always be with me”, she writes, “No one could take them away. It was up to me to make the most of them, in whatever time remained.”
Like it or not, life is a delicate balance of ups and downs. It is mountaintops and valleys, joys and sorrows. We don’t get one without the other.
No matter how tough the going may get, this simple truth remains. The tough do get going. They make the choice. They fight for life.
That is the choice each of us faces. We can choose to fight or we can choose to surrender. We can pick ourselves up from life’s setbacks and bruises and move on or we can slump back in our recliner and whine the days away bemoaning what could have or should have been.
Janis Ian made the choice to fight. She discovered that regardless of what she had lost she still had the most important things in life. She still had her dreams and her talent. She still had songs in her heart.
How about you? Perhaps you are reeling from some of life’s toughest blows. You have lost money, health, or even a life-long companion. You are at the end of your rope.
There is always a choice and only you can make it. Only you can decide to move on and live your days – no matter how few or many they may be – to the fullest.
I won’t tell you it will be easy. Few good things come easily. But it is right. It is our God-given responsibility to live this life and live it well until we draw our last breath.
Even in “Days Like These”.