I love Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel and I have for as long as I can remember. The opening verse paints a very clear picture for me.
Climbing up on Solsbury Hill.
I could see the city light.
Wind was blowing, time stood still.
Eagle flew out of the night.
He was something to observe.
Came in close, I heard a voice.
Standing, stretching every nerve.
Had to listen, had no choice.
Another thing that is interesting about this song for me was that it was the only thing that could get my son to sleep at night when he was a baby. The recorded version has a very soothing energy.
Here’s the song on You Tube.
I think the song has some very clear and valid points on personal growth and creating the life you want.
The way that I have interpreted the song, the character has a mystical or spiritual experience and he is compelled to listen. He decides to keep the experience to himself because people would think he was crazy – “To keep in silence I resigned. My friends would think I was a nut.” He keeps going through the motions of day to day life until he decides how to move forward – “So I went from day to day though my life was in a rut.” Then he steps outside of the box – “I walked right out of the machinery.” He faces the challenges of his expansion – “When Illusion spin her net, I’m never where I want to be. Liberty, she pirouette when I think that I am free” until finally he is free – “I will show another me. Today I don’t need a replacement. I’ll show them what the smile on my face meant.”
Here’s an example. Guglielmo Marconi had the inspiration that he could create a device that would transmit voice and sound over a distance without any wires – a totally crazy idea at the time. He keeps his idea to himself for awhile and thinks it through until he has some belief that it can really be done before he tells anyone about it. Once the idea is out he gets to face the the world trying to keep him in the box. The story goes that his friends and family had him go in for a psychological evaluation because the idea was just too crazy. Of course we know today that he was successful, as was Tesla who did the same thing, because we are surrounded by wireless communication.
Any time that you have an outside-the-box idea for something new or different you have to be careful of who you share it with until your belief in your idea is strong enough to weather the storm of doubts that it will face once you let it out. My wife and I have had some outside-the-box ideas that we have had to keep to ourselves for a period of time. She quit a corporate job to become a massage therapist. I quit a job that I absolutely hated, and the medical insurance that went with it, less than a month before my son was born (Yes, I did get a new job and they let me start on a Friday, the last day of the month, so that my new insurance would cover my son’s birth). Then I quit that job to do network marketing full time from home. Now we are buying land to build a rammed earth house that will be completely self-sustaining and off the grid.
Ok, our big moves are nothing like the big names in history, like Marconi and Tesla, but they are still well outside of “the box” and you have to build up the strength of your belief before you tell anyone about it. Our parents used to have some doubts about the things that we take on but they’ve gotten used to it now.
Eventually though, you do have to let your ideas out of the box, face the doubters, and let it ideas and dreams grow.
“Hey! I said, You can keep my things they’ve come to take me home!”
Wayne Woodworth
