So I’m listening to Howard Jones, as I often do, and one of his most famous songs comes on: Hide and Seek (the one he played at Wembley Stadium for Live Aid in 1985).
It still sends shivers down my spine, whenever I hear it! If memory serves, Human’s Lib was the first proper album I ever owned (on cassette, natch), and it just blew me away. HoJo is why I love keyboards!
This song, in particular, fascinated me. Given that it’s written as a story of sorts, as a child of 12, I used to wonder at the lyrics, which in part read:
So she had built her elaborate home
With its ups and its downs, its rains and its sun
She decided that her work was done, time to have fun
and she found a game to play
Then as part of the game
She completely forgot where she'd hidden herself
And she spent the rest of her time
Trying to find the parts
I remember trying to follow it, logically, as far as I could before always giving up and thinking I just wasn’t clever enough to understand.
(Can we just take a moment to raise a glass to little Giles, trying his best to grok the human condition, even way back then 😍)
It’s pretty clear to me now that he’s talking about our ‘True Selves’ – that indescribable essence of who-we-really-are, before thinking.
That, without which the world cannot be perceived or seen. “The first knowing,” as I’ve heard it described.
This notion of hide and seek came up in a conversation with a client the other day, as we were looking at moods, and how when we’re in a low mood, we genuinely can’t find our (True) selves.
Not only does it look like it’s gone, but we can’t even comprehend that it was there in the first place!
😂
We’re so lost in the mind’s stories and, as a consequence, everything looks so real and serious and urgent and impossible.
But then when we’re present to life and we’re not being distracted by the mind’s chatter, we’re back in touch with who-we-really-are and we’re swimming in intuition and creativity and understanding and all is just flowing easily.
And it seems a bit silly that we thought we’d lost it.
🤦🏻
But here’s the thing: the game is hide-and-seek. It’s not find-and-stay-found! Where would be the fun in that?!
No, life has its ups and its downs, its rains and its sun.
The chorus, tellingly, goes:
Hope you find it in everything.
Everything that you see.
Hope you find me in you.
Forty years later, my mind still can’t really understand these things, but I’m grateful for the feeling this song brings out in me.
And I rejoice each and every time it looks like I’ve lost it, but then the dynamics of this eternal game of hide and seek shift, and, once more, I “find it in everything.”
Everything that I see.
💟
Giles
p.s. If you want help with life’s ups and downs, however insurmountable they may seem, then putting people back in touch with the firm ground of Innate Health is what I do → https://gilespcroft.com/individuals
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Giles P Croft
Another Sunday Spiritual; this time one where I baldly disagree with HoJo 😳