Note from Porch co-founder Gareth Higgins: David LaMotte has been one of my closest friends for over a decade now, and his vocation as an activist singer-songwriter-storyteller has taught me many things. David’s insight about why heroism is overrated is profound, and could not only change the way we think about how change happens, but change the way we try to change things. There’s a lot of change there, so let David explain:
And to go deeper, here’s the first chapter of David’s book You Are Changing the World, Whether You Like it or Not:
I knew I was a real ‘road dog’ not when I first woke up in a hotel and didn’t know in which town I was, but when I woke up, didn’t know, wasn’t concerned about it, and simply went ahead with my shower.
I have spent more than three decades on the road as a touring musician and songwriter, performing in all fifty of the states in the U.S. and on five of the seven continents. Not knowing where I was had stopped surprising me; I knew it would come to me later.
Mornings have never been my specialty. Or rather, I prefer for them to come at the end of my day after a long night of music. Sunrises are a lovely transition to going to bed. The experience of growing comfortable with not knowing where I was when I awoke, though, spoke more to the amount of time I was spending on the road than it did to my usual morning brain fog.
I wasn’t in a hotel when I woke up on the morning of January 9, 2001. I was staying with my longtime friend Ann and her family. Though I did feel a bit disoriented, I knew these things: 1) I was in my friend’s guest room in Leander, Texas, just north of Austin, well into a concert tour that was taking me across the South and over into New Mexico; 2) It was late morning, and the sun was cutting in through the blinds; and 3) I didn’t feel very good.
I had gone to dinner the night before with my friend Kristin, and by the time I woke up, Ann and her daughter Ellen, then a senior in high school, had left for work and school. I wrote in my journal a bit, took a shower, threw some clothes on, and got out my laptop to do a bit of bookkeeping. In those days, people still bought lots of CDs at concerts, so the morning after a concert usually involved some bookkeeping. One not-so-glamorous side of being a professional independent musician is that in the eyes of the IRS, I run a small business, with all of the attendant number crunching. It’s not very rock star, but it’s a necessary part of the work that I treasure so deeply, so I don’t mind the routine.
This particular day, however, was not to be routine.
As I got down to work plugging sales numbers into a spreadsheet, something strange began to happen. When I looked at the computer, I realized I was having a hard time seeing what was on the screen. It was as though I had been staring at a lightbulb and had a ghost image obscuring a spot near the middle of my vision. Looking at an individual cell in the spreadsheet seemed to be too difficult.
From where I had been sitting on the couch, there was a bright window behind the computer screen, making it hard to see. I thought that might be the problem, so I moved, but I still couldn’t see the screen very well. I was also beginning to feel nauseous, and I started to wonder if I might have picked up a bug. I felt worse with each passing minute, so I gave up on the computer work.
Thinking it might calm my body and brain a bit, I ran a bath, but I only felt more nauseated. And then things got even stranger. My arms began to go numb. It was as though they were ‘asleep,’ but without the tingling of reawakening. I could use them, clumsily, but I couldn’t feel much of anything. That lasted about twenty minutes, then gradually subsided. I started to get nervous. The flu had never done that to me before.
Ann was at work, and I didn’t have her number there, so I called Kristin to ask for it. I told her what was going on and she gave me the number. Because I was feeling disoriented, I wanted to make sure that I had written the number down right. I read it back to her, but I read it out wrong, and she corrected me.
I tried again. To this day, I still believe I had written the digits down correctly, but somehow when I went to read them back to her, I was saying them incorrectly. It was as though I couldn’t remember what the individual numbers were called. The numbers’ names were jumbled. Kristin got scared, and so did I. She called Ann, and Ann called me.
While Ann was racing home from the city, my arms went numb again. As before, it lasted about twenty minutes. Before Ann got home, her daughter Ellen arrived home from high school. Ellen, who is now a physician, told me later that I was trying to talk to her but making no sense—I pointed to a chair and said ‘wedding.’
Ann is a strong woman, doing her part to uphold the proud lineage of butt-kicking Texas matriarchs from whom she is descended. She’s a good person to have around in a crisis. We had become friends through the Kerrville Folk Festival, a magical mecca for songwriters and acoustic music enthusiasts that runs for eighteen days each year on a big dusty ranch in the gentle hill country west of San Antonio. We had camped there together each year for over a decade and had kept in touch through the rest of the year. Over time, she had become like a sister to me, and as her two daughters grew up, they had become good friends as well. I had the honor of officiating at Ellen’s wedding a few years ago.
On the day in question, though, I wondered if these relationships and every other personal connection in my life might be rushing to a close. Ann got me in the car and blazed down the highway, talking on the phone with the emergency room at the nearest hospital.
On the way there, I tried to figure out what was happening to me. I was gradually losing my ability to use language, I was throwing up, and my arms kept going numb. Stroke? Brain tumor? Aneurism? Multiple Sclerosis? I couldn’t come up with any hypothesis that wasn’t catastrophic, and things were rapidly getting worse.
When I asked Ann to tell me her name she got really scared. I had been trying to think of it and couldn’t, which was ridiculous. She was not just a casual friend. I didn’t want to scare her, but it was both frustrating and terrifying that I couldn’t get to it, so I asked her, and I managed to make the question understood. She said, “David, it’s Ann, I’m your good friend and I’m taking you to the hospital.” I already understood everything but her name, though, and at that point I realized that I wasn’t actually having too much trouble thinking, per se, it was just that the labels were all mixed up. I knew who and where and with whom I was, but words weren’t working for me. It wasn’t as though I were drunk or losing consciousness; the primary neurological symptom was simply that I was losing access to language. I would later learn that this is called aphasia.
It seemed unlikely to me that this accelerating dysfunction was going to slow down or reverse. Therefore, it was likely that this was effectively the end of my life as I had known it. I might be accelerating toward a vegetative state, losing mental capacity and use of my limbs, or I might simply be dying, but in that moment, it seemed impossible that things would ever return to what I had known as normal.
Ann squealed into the driveway of the emergency room, where we were met by a bearded nurse with a wheelchair who immediately started asking me questions as he moved me bodily into the chair. I could still speak, though incoherently, but I couldn’t answer, “What’s seven plus three?” or tell him where my parents live. Meanwhile, Ann was talking a blue Texan streak, laying down the law with the nurse, insisting that drugs were not a part of this, and that they shouldn’t waste time eliminating that possibility.
The next few hours are hazy for me. I was quite dehydrated, and they put two bags of saline solution in my arm. They performed CAT scans, blood work, and a spinal tap, checking for each of the possible conditions I had thought of and a couple more that would be equally dire. Gradually, I lost the ability to speak altogether, stopped throwing up, and lost consciousness.
After a few hours I woke up again, and while I was still disoriented and having language issues, things seemed to be less severe. As it turned out, the shape of this day was not a simple slope into complete dysfunction, but a bell curve, and the symptoms I had experienced gradually subsided over the next few hours.
Aside from a sore back and headache from the spinal tap, I was mostly fine by the next morning. The doctor said that what I had experienced was a ‘complex migraine.’ Migraines, I learned, are not necessarily headaches at all. Headaches are just a common symptom. A migraine is a neurological condition which, according to the doctor who treated me that day, arises from spasms in the brain’s blood vessels which prevent blood from getting to some parts of the brain. Other doctors argue that it is more of an electrical storm. A complex migraine, my doctor explained, is a migraine that results in neurological dysfunction.
What happened to me that day was certainly among the more dramatic events of my life. It was terrifying and bizarre, and then it was over. The next day I drove out of town in Dan the Tan Van, my beloved Chevy Astro, heading for New Mexico, where I had another couple of concerts booked.
One of the things I love about life on the road is the balance between that intensely interactive, vulnerable time with people at concerts and the complete solitude of driving for hours the next day. These days, driving that much raises important questions of one’s carbon footprint, but if it weren’t for that, I would drive long distances for the sheer joy of it. Sometimes I long for the bygone tradition of Sunday afternoon family drives, hitting the road purely for the intrinsic value of the trip. As an introvert in an extroverted line of work, I need that road time to process, muse, and ponder, so that I’m ready to be fully present with the people I encounter in the next town, and so that I can try to figure out what the conversations and experiences I’d had meant for me, my art, and my spirit.
Driving down the long, straight highways of West Texas and New Mexico after that terrifying day in Austin, I had time to consider what had happened and its significance. I spent nearly two weeks musing about my medical misadventure before I wrote about it (I was a ‘proto-blogger,' beginning to write periodic Notes from the Road on my website—ironically, about three weeks before a man named John Barger coined the word ‘weblog’, in December of 1997).
The migraine experience had changed me in several ways. First, I had spent a few hours thinking that my life was coming to a close, and I’d had time to consider what that meant to me. What struck me as I reflected on that experience was that, though I was certainly scared, I felt no sense of injustice, even in the dramatic moments when I thought I might be dying: I wasn’t disappointed with the life I had lived up until then. While I wasn’t eager to die at the age of thirty-two, I couldn’t complain that I hadn’t had a rich ride. I was basically content. Even now, more than twenty years later, that’s a good thing for me to remember. I celebrate the intervening years as ‘bonus time.’ It’s as if I got an extra life in a video game, except it’s a real life.
The second and more unusual insight that grew out of that day’s experience was much deeper for me. When I was gradually losing control and contact, I had a perception of my mind receding from me. It was such a vivid image that it almost appeared to be happening in physical space. As I was losing consciousness in the hospital, there was something that seemed to be moving away from me in the darkness, like a ball of flickering blue light, which I understood to be my own intellect—my capacity for thought and reason.
What is interesting about that is that my perspective was not from within that mind looking back; my mind was moving away from me. What was left was not logic and thought, but existence. It was my deepest identity. My best interpretation is that this was my spirit, the deepest place that defines me. And for the first time in my life, I could almost tangibly perceive that as separate and distinct from my thinking mind. There was and is a deep comfort for me in having that almost visceral experience of my own spiritual identity—not what I think, but who I am when words, logic, and calculation have been stripped away.
The third observation, though, is the one that brings me to write this book. I couldn’t help but notice that the two things that had been taken from me that day were my hands and my words.
At the time, I was celebrating my first decade of making a living by playing guitar and singing self-penned songs. It was powerful for me to consider that on that day, it was these two things, in particular, that I had lost: my ability to hold a guitar and feel the tips of my fingers pressing into steel strings, and my capacity to choose and use words, whether for their meaning or their musicality. The extremely personal tools of my art and my trade had been taken away.
And then they were returned.
The question may as well have been written in neon in the sky: “What will you do with these hands and these words?” Or, as the poet Mary Oliver famously wrote, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I had been wrestling with that question in a more general and ambiguous sense for many years, but now it was suddenly brought into searing clarity, forcing me to interrogate my own days and the motivations that drive how I fill them. It was another gift to me, if a painful one, and I continue to receive it, and to feel its sting.
I suspect that very few of us find that our beliefs and our actions match up neatly. I certainly had seen a gulf between the two in my own life, and this experience forced me to face it head on. In the years since that misadventure in Texas, I’ve reoriented my life somewhat, wrestling with my own sense of call and exploring where my own joy and gifts can be useful in the world.
For a decade—my entire adult life at that point—I had been traveling around singing hopeful songs about better ways to live our lives, be present, and love each other—and I think that matters. Music can open our hearts in ways that words by themselves seldom can. But I wanted to explore more direct forms of change.
Gradually, I became more active in seeking out ways to have a more tangible positive impact on the world around me, and one small step led to others. In 2004, my wife Deanna and I co-founded a non-profit that supports school and library projects in Guatemala. In 2008, I suspended my music career and moved to Australia to pursue a master’s degree in International Studies, Peace, and Conflict Resolution as a Rotary World Peace Fellow. The following year I spent three months in rural southern India, working with a Gandhian sustainable development organization. In 2011, I began a six-year stint on the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)’s Nobel Peace Prize Nominating Committee. In recent years, I have been doing a lot more speaking and writing, in an effort to encourage people to address the problems they see rather than just complain about them. More recently, I’ve gone to jail a couple of times for nonviolent civil disobedience, protesting misguided policies that are hurting people in the state where I live, North Carolina. In the midst of all this, I’ve engaged in many smaller and less dramatic efforts, as most of us do.
My medical mishap, though terrifying, was a gift to me. It made me seriously evaluate my life. A sudden, striking awareness of the finitude of one’s life naturally leads to questions about how one should spend it. And, of course, the question of what one should do leads directly to the question of what one can do.
Like most people, I suspect, I open the paper or click through the news online with a sense of malaise that sometimes borders on despair. The problems we face—as individuals, as families, as communities, as nations, and as a planet—are significant, large, and insidious. It is sometimes hard to imagine how anyone can have much of an impact, much less how I can.
Beyond this sense of overwhelm and paralysis, even if we can imagine engaging, questions remain regarding how and where to begin. Where should I start? What’s most important? In a world full of need, what, specifically, should I do? We will wrestle with those questions and others in the following pages, but I don’t pretend that they are easy questions to answer.
I do believe, however, that you can have a significant impact. Not the general you, but the specific one. That’s not a starry-eyed, hopeful-but-naive statement; it is a conclusion I have been led to through years of wrestling with the questions that inspired this book. I know it to be true for many reasons, some of which are laid out in the chapters that follow. Our cultural assumptions about our individual roles in steering large-scale change, how change comes about, and who causes that change, are often misguided. I want to spend some time turning these assumptions over and holding them up to the light to see whether they are true or not—and, with that knowledge, how they should influence our daily choices.
Though this book endeavors to be an honest, reality-based look at how things change and what we can hope to accomplish, it is also unapologetically hopeful. Part of my goal is to argue that those two characteristics, honest and hopeful, are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Historian Howard Zinn argues in the first chapter of his People’s History of the United States that objectivism should not be a goal for historians. All historians necessarily bring their own “selection, simplification, [and] emphasis” to their subject matter, he suggests. He goes on to suggest that the most honest approach to presenting history is to clearly state one’s own biases and goals. Starting from the same set of facts, each of us naturally tends to see different pieces as important and emphasize those.
With that in mind, I will explicitly name my own agenda: I want my son and the rest of his generation to grow up in a world that is growing and healing rather than one that is tearing itself apart, socially, politically, and physically.
In order to accomplish that, I need to convince you to lend your energy to creating that world. The best way I know to do that is to write this book. In it, I hope to 1) challenge some wrongheaded ideas about how change happens, 2) convince you of your own capacity to have an impact, and 3) offer some questions to help you discern your own callings—how and where you can offer your gifts and energy to a movement of people trying to shift things in healthier and more sustainable directions.
I am not, however, trying to win you over to my causes or positions. This book doesn’t seek to recruit you to any causes but your own (assuming those causes are generally intended to make the world around you a better place), though I do unabashedly hope to recruit you to those. I don’t know what you are passionate about, but I believe that if more of us actually take action on the issues that concern us, we will all be better off. Our most dangerous threat, in the end, is apathy.
[Extracted from David LaMotte’s book You are Changing the World, Whether You Like It Or Not.]
David LaMotte is a songwriter, speaker, and author. He has performed over 3500 concerts and released thirteen full-length CDs of primarily original music, touring in all of the fifty states and on five of the seven continents. The Boston Globe writes that his music “pushes the envelope with challenging lyrics and unusual tunings, but he also pays homage to folk tradition,” while BBC Radio Belfast lauds his “charm, stories, humour, insightful songs, sweet voice and dazzling guitar ability.” His most recent album, Still, features the number one song on Folk Radio in September, 2022 (September Me), and the album remained in the top twenty for six months. He has been a featured performer at top tier music festivals including the Kerrville Folk Festival, Merlefest, the Auckland Folk Festival (NZ), and the Australian National Folk Festival. www.davidlamotte.com
