Great podcast here: Malcolm Gladwell interviewing Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy about how he writes songs, supporting his recent book on the same topic.

Like a lot of artists, what stitches Tweedy’s songs together is intuition — linking the seemingly random events of life; drawing together the themes to create a tapestry that somehow makes sense to him. This bit at the end really jumped out at me. Jump to about 40:00.

As Tweedy mentions, often, we are too busy, stressed out, and worried to actually observe what is going on around us. We have a million things vying for our attention, and many times, they succeed in distracting us from our immediate reality.

But when we do take the time and make the effort to actually see and experience reality, it’s often telling us a strange, fascinating, and beautiful story.

That story is being told all the time — we just need to stop what we’re doing and pay attention.

I’ve always believed we as humans are meaning-seeking creatures. We need to make sense of the world we live in. We need to let our brains do that — to find the meaning. Meaning makes sense to us — far more sense than randomness and ambiguity and chance. We’re designed to do that.

So don’t be such a nihilist, ok?