Today’s track: So Beautiful or So What — Paul Simon
“Rejoice! The purpose of life is joy. Rejoice at the sky, the sun, the stars, the grass, the trees, animals, people. If this joy is disturbed it means that you’ve made a mistake somewhere. Find your mistake and correct it. Most often this joy is disturbed by money and ambition.”
— Leo Tolstoy
I’ve read that a few times now and it keeps getting heavier.
Look at the list. The sky, the sun, the stars, the grass, the trees, animals, people. That’s the whole inventory of things you’re supposed to rejoice at — and not one of them costs a dollar. Not one of them is the next deal, the next door, the next number you’ve been telling yourself will finally make the rest of it feel like enough.
Then the turn, and it’s a quiet knife. If this joy is disturbed, it means you’ve made a mistake somewhere. He doesn’t say the world is against you. He doesn’t say life is just hard. He says you took a wrong turn — and the missing joy is how you find out. The flat feeling isn’t a mood to push through. It’s information. It’s the dashboard light.
And then he tells you exactly where to pop the hood. Most often this joy is disturbed by money and ambition.
Here’s where I have to be honest, because I love this part of my life. I like to build and create within the business space. That’s the fun for me — the new idea, the thing that didn’t exist last week, the “what if we tried it like this.” So I’m always walking a fine line between the joy of it and the ambition of it, because for me they live in the same room. The building is the joy. It’s also, if I’m not careful, the exact thing Tolstoy’s pointing at.
The way I keep it on the right side of the line is I try not to put too much pressure on any one idea. Every idea is just a seed. Some grow now, some grow down the road, some never grow at all, and that’s fine — you plant the next one. The second I let a single idea carry my whole sense of whether the day was good or bad, that’s when ambition stops being play and starts being the thing that disturbs the joy. The pressure is the mistake. The seed was never the problem.
That’s the line. Build because you love building. Plant because planting is good. Just don’t make any one seed responsible for your peace.
Paul Simon says all of this too.
“Ain’t it strange the way we’re ignorant, how we seek out bad advice. How we jigger it and figure it, mistaking value for the price.”
Mistaking value for the price. Read that twice. The price is the number — clean, knowable, easy to chase. The value is the thing the number was supposed to buy you. And somewhere in the jiggering and figuring, we swap them and don’t even notice we did it. We get really, really good at the price and quietly lose the thread on the value.
I see it in my own business constantly. A house has a price. What it’s worth to the family standing in the driveway is something else entirely — the school district, the porch, the room the kid finally gets to himself, the first place they ever actually owned. The good deals, the ones that feel good years later, are the ones where somebody kept those two things straight. The bad ones are where price ate value alive. Turns out that’s not just a real estate problem. That’s the whole human problem. Tolstoy and Paul Simon are describing the same swap from two different centuries.
And the song doesn’t preach it at you. It just keeps shrugging. So beautiful, or so what. He runs the whole catalog — making a chicken gumbo, tossing the sausage in, cayenne to make it hot. Telling his kids a bedtime story, a play without a plot, and not even promising them a happy ending, because he won’t lie to them. An empty house on Weed Street across from a vacant lot. Four men on a balcony and Dr. King has just been shot. The beautiful and the unbearable, stacked in the same breath, and the only thing he’ll commit to is the chorus: life is what you make of it.
Which lands in the exact spot Tolstoy did. The joy is already here. It’s on the list. Sky, trees, people, gumbo on the stove, a kid who wants a story. The raw material doesn’t change much from one life to the next. What changes is whether you call it beautiful or whether you shrug at it.
And that’s the part I can’t get past. So beautiful, or so what. Is there honestly any other way to look at your life? Because the beauty is sitting there either way. The guy who picks “beautiful” and the guy who picks “so what” are standing in front of the same sky. One of them is just refusing to name it.
Choosing “so what” is willfully choosing to be unhappy. That’s all it is. It’s not realism. It’s not being tough or clear-eyed about how hard things are. The hardness is real — Dr. King’s on that balcony in the same song — and it’s still beautiful, or so what. Picking the shrug doesn’t make you wise. It just makes you the one person at the table who decided the gumbo wasn’t worth tasting.
So here’s the whole thing this morning, and it’s not complicated. If your joy’s gone quiet, believe Tolstoy — that’s not bad luck, that’s a wrong turn, and he already handed you the most likely suspect. Look at your money and your ambition and ask which one’s been driving. Keep building, keep planting — just don’t pile your whole peace onto one seed.
So beautiful, or so what. It was never really a question.
Warmly,
Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Schedule a time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind.
The Morning Bergeron daily track playlist: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-morning-bergeron/pl.u-pMyl2GlSW1N3qv
PS: Got a text yesterday. Seller on a little 2/1 in 40214 — 172 E. Francis — says make me an offer. $150K, 5%, 30-year am, 5-year balloon. Owner-financed. That's a point and a half under what a bank quotes today. She wants 15% down, non-refundable — they need skin in the game. Everything else is negotiable. If that's your kind of deal. Hit me up!