Born to Run

by Bruce Springsteen

Looking back, it was a mix of mostly average guys who simply needed to let off a little steam at the end of the week and a few others, moved by harder things, who didn’t know where to draw the line.

In a country this rich, it isn’t right. A dignified decent living is not too much to ask. Where you take it from there is up to you but that much should be a birthright.

I’ve learned you’ve got to pull up the things that mean something to you in order for them to mean anything to your audience. That’s where the proof is. That’s how they know you’re not kidding. With the record’s final verse, “Tonight I’ll be on that hill . . . ,” my characters stand unsure of their fate but dug in and committed. By the end of Darkness, I’d found my adult voice.

You simply can’t stop imagining other worlds, other loves, other places than the one you are comfortably settled in at any given moment, the one holding all your treasures. Those treasures can seem so easily made gray by the vast, open and barren spaces of the creative mind.

All I do know is as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher.

You walk, now, not just at your partner’s side, but alongside your own mortal self. You fight to hold on to your newfound blessings while confronting your nihilism, your destructive desire to leave it all in ruins.

There are plenty of folks in great relationships without the marriage certificate, but we felt there was something meaningful and important in the declaration of our feelings, something that for us was essential. That’s why there is a statement of vows, a public promise, a blessing of your union, a celebration. When you do this in front of your friends, your family, your world, it’s a coming out of sorts, an announcement to everyone that this is how we’re going to officially roll from here on in, together, two for the road.

We honor our parents by carrying their best forward and laying the rest down. By fighting and taming the demons that laid them low and now reside in us.