Pick Apart
“Pick Apart” is a carpe diem song that builds up from an acoustic guitar and breathy vocals to flying high strings and an emotion-choked falsetto. Ideally, life is a tradeoff between times of relative comfort and ease and times of pushing through discomfort for the sake of growth, even discomfort of your own design. On the average weekend, this looks like equal parts being—reading on my front porch with an endless stream of coffee and the occasional stream of consciousness—and doing—hurling my body at rock walls and up remote peaks. At least in the summer. Summer has become more a season of doing for me. While I relish the slower and cooler parts of the year (soup! sweaters! snuggling!), I often find the transition to fall to be a bit funereal. People who struggle with being, as I sometimes do (Does anyone recall the Spiderman meme of COVID depression, seasonal depression, and regular depression?), can feel entrapped by it. Chronic illness, anxiety, grief, and loneliness can all make the life of the mind a nightmare, a place in which we are overcome by being:
It might take 4 days for them to find me
My dog would lick my face
I hate the thought of people at my funeral with yearbook cliches
In one of my favorite movies, While You Were Sleeping,” Ox, in his own mild discomfort of trading donuts for a heart-healthy breakfast of bran muffins, observes, “Life is a pain in the ass. I’ll tell ya’, you know. You work hard, try to provide for the family, and then for one minute ... everything’s good. Everyone’s well, everyone’s happy, and in that one minute you have peace.” We are often asleep to those moments. And we are most awake to our pain. What do we do with it all?
Crain exhorts us to see that during moments of seeming inertia or ”weakening quicksand,” life is happening in the holding on; in our most untethered moments we are tethered to our common humanity. We cannot disavow this aspect of our lives, whether it brings transformation or not. So we must pose other questions. In listening to such a song, can I find the will to climb the mountain that is the “cautious mind?” Can I do myself a small kindness? Can I permit myself rest and stir again the parts of myself that long for meaningful experiences, movement, and connection?
For a beginner friendly introduction to being and doing, I recommend this article from Gregg Levoy.
Crain, Samantha. “Pick Apart.” Bandcamp, 27 Aug. 2021, https://samanthacrain.bandcamp.com/track/pick-apart. Accessed 21 Apr. 2025.