Amidst the Rush: The Question That Opens REVERENCE
A personal reflection by Kristie Lee
Amidst the Rush began as a quiet crisis in my head.
I started looking around and feeling as though everyone was moving toward something.
The next accomplishment.
The next goal.
The next version of themselves.
The next place they were supposed to arrive.
And I was moving too.
My life was full. Really full. Full of work and people and music and responsibilities and things I had chosen and things I loved.
But somewhere inside all of that fullness, I began to wonder if I was actually experiencing it.
It wasn't that there wasn't enough in my life.
It was almost the opposite.
There was so much that my lens had become too narrow to contain it.
I could see where I was going, but I wasn't sure I was seeing where I was.
And once I noticed that, I couldn't stop noticing it.
I began wondering whether the problem was not the life around me, but the speed at which I was moving through it.
Maybe I needed to widen my view.
Maybe appreciating what was already here required me to stop moving toward everything else quite so quickly.
That thought was surprisingly uncomfortable.
Because there was another fear underneath it.
What happens if I stop pushing?
What happens if I stop growing?
What happens if I become satisfied with what is already here?
There is something frightening about slowing down in a world that seems to value almost everything according to growth.
More reach.
More success.
More productivity.
More relevance.
More.
And somewhere along the way, it becomes very easy to confuse becoming more with becoming worthwhile.
I realized I was afraid that if I stopped moving forward so aggressively, I might somehow become less.
Less relevant.
Less visible.
Less capable.
Maybe even less valuable.
So Amidst the Rush grew out of that tension.
I wanted to slow down enough to notice my life.
And I was afraid of what slowing down might mean.
The song does not resolve that tension by declaring ambition bad or movement meaningless. I don't believe either of those things.
There are places worth going.
There are things worth building.
Growth can be beautiful.
But movement and progress are not always the same thing.
Sometimes we can become so focused on the place ahead of us that the present becomes little more than a hallway we are walking through on our way somewhere else.
And a life can disappear that way.
Not because nothing happened.
Because everything did.
And we were already looking toward the next thing.
That is the question at the beginning of REVERENCE:
Can I keep moving without missing where I am?
Amidst the Rush does not begin the album with an answer.
It begins with Awakening.
Awakening to the speed.
Awakening to the fear.
Awakening to how narrow the view has become.
And wondering what might appear if we widened it.
The song began there, as a question in my own head.
Then I brought it to JETTER.
And now the band is giving that question a sound.
That is where REVERENCE begins.
Not with stopping.
Not with arriving.
But with Act 1 of REVERENCE:
Awakening.
Kristie Lee
JETTER
