By age 16 Janis Ian was already a household name in the pop music world. Her social commentary anthem about inter-racial dating Society’s Child shattered the innocence of late 60s rock and roll and vaulted her to the forefront as a spokesman for her generation. She made the cover of countless magazines. Her music was everywhere. No less than classical music icon Leonard Bernstein was singing her praises.

She had fame, money, and freedom to explore all the excesses that came with both. She did so with enthusiasm.

Less than two decades later all that was lost. She owed over a million dollars to the IRS for taxes she thought she had paid but instead had gone into the pocket of an unscrupulous manager. She was penniless. She was relegated to the status of a music trivia question. Unable to find a stage to sing from, abandoned by the pop music audience, and reeling from incredibly poor choices of friends and lovers that left her physically beaten and battered, she was at the end of her rope.

“I have never been so depressed in my life,” she writes in her autobiography, Society’s Child, “Life was over. Why bother going on?”

With all hope seemingly lost, she turned one last time to the one thing she knew. She picked up her guitar and began plucking out a melody. Thoughts began to form.

She wrote one line, “On days like these, when the rain won’t fall”. Then she followed with another, “and the sky is so dry that even birds can’t call.”

As she wrote an even more important, more compelling thought than any song lyric she had written came to mind.

She recalled something a friend had told her years before, that no matter what happens in life “there is always a choice”.  Those words would galvanize her will and start her on the journey back.

“I was only thirty-seven,” Ian recalled, “My circumstances sucked, but maybe I was still young enough to rise above them…at the least, I could try to figure a way out.”

The fighting spirit within her rose in her consciousness. She determined not to give up. That song, Days Like These, marked her first step back. 

At that moment and with that choice she embraced a truth that is essential to anyone who yearns to live life with grace, purpose, and passion.

“I knew that until the day I died, my dreams and my talent would always be with me”, she writes, “No one could take them away. It was up to me to make the most of them, in whatever time remained.”

Like it or not, life is a delicate balance of ups and downs. It is mountaintops and valleys, joys and sorrows. We don’t get one without the other.

No matter how tough the going may get, this simple truth remains. The tough do get going. They make the choice. They fight for life.

That is the choice each of us faces. We can choose to fight or we can choose to surrender. We can pick ourselves up from life’s setbacks and bruises and move on or we can slump back in our recliner and whine the days away bemoaning what could have or should have been.

Janis Ian made the choice to fight. She discovered that regardless of what she had lost she still had the most important things in life. She still had her dreams and her talent. She still had songs in her heart.

How about you? Perhaps you are reeling from some of life’s toughest blows. You have lost money, health, or even a life-long companion. You are at the end of your rope.

There is always a choice and only you can make it. Only you can decide to move on and live your days – no matter how few or many they may be – to the fullest.

I won’t tell you it will be easy. Few good things come easily. But it is right. It is our God-given responsibility to live this life and live it well until we draw our last breath.

Even in “Days Like These”.

I love baseball.  I played the game almost every single day of every single summer when I was a kid.  When I wasn’t playing baseball I was watching it.  Every Saturday I sat transfixed in front of our black and white TV set watching the NBC Game of the Week with Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean.  On weeknights I would sit with my ear to our big upright console radio and listen to the games, especially when my beloved New York Yankees played the Chicago White Sox.  With paper and pencil in hand I would keep score, taking in every word of every second of the broadcast. 

Winters, though filled with some other childhood pursuits, were long and grew longer with each passing day in the anticipation of the coming baseball season. 

I understood what baseball legend Rogers Hornsby meant when he said, “People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball.  I'll tell you what I do.  I stare out the window and wait for spring.” 

Did I mention the New York Yankees?  I was a fan of the Yankees, the real Yankees.  The Yankees of the late 50s and early 60s.  The Yankees of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris.  The Yankees of Bobby Richardson and Tony Kubek.  The Yankees of Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford.  The Yankees of Elston Howard and Clete Boyer.  Man, I loved those Yankees. 

My grandfather took me to Chicago’s Comiskey Park on a hot, sunny, Saturday afternoon in 1961 to see the Yankees and White Sox battle it out.  Mantle and Maris were in the midst of that amazing home run derby season when Maris would ultimately smack 61 round trippers to break the “unbreakable” record that Babe Ruth had held. Seeing my heroes in person in old Comiskey is a magical memory I will cherish all the way to my grave. 

Yes, I love baseball.  I love it because it has something most other sports lack.  It sets its own pace.  There is no clock to rush the game along.  It can be short or it can be long.  The game determines its own length. 

I love baseball because it has grace.  In my opinion there is nothing as beautiful and intricate as a ground ball up the middle with the bases loaded and everyone – I mean everyone – moving to their designated spot to take a relay throw or back up a base or home plate.  It is ballet on a stage of dirt and grass. 

There is elegance in the cat-and-mouse game that gets played between pitchers and hitters, and pitchers and base runners.  There is strategy in play on every pitch, to every batter, in every inning. 

Mostly, I love baseball because it is still the same game I watched as a kid some 50 years ago.  Sure, the parks and the names have changed.  Today there is the ever present talk of drugs and trades and contract disputes, but in the end all those things are discussions for the newspapers and locker rooms and the nightly ESPN broadcast. 

Between the lines baseball remains the same graceful, elegant game of my youth.  Between the lines lies a true “field of dreams” for many young boys today just as it was for me so many years ago.  Every dusty playground diamond is Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium and every pick-up game is the seventh game of the World Series. 

I love baseball because when it is played as it should be played it is a microcosm of how life should be lived.  It is a game of grace, purpose, and passion,  and every pitch, every movement and every moment demands and is deserving of our utmost devotion. 

Baseball and life go together like the ballpark and a hot dog.  There is one huge difference between the two, however.  Baseball is played for a season, a few brief but shining months of the year, and a few fleeting hours of the day. 

On the other hand, life is something we are given to live each and every day.  We wake up each morning and choose our path, our attitude, our purpose for that day.  We can waste it or we can delight in it.  We can simply endure it or we can live it with grace, purpose and passion. 

Life is an everyday pick-up game.   In the end, it’s even better than baseball.

Have you ever had a dream die? Most all of us have at some time or another. Perhaps it was the dream of being a professional athlete and that dream crumbled under a college knee injury or more likely from a sudden realization that you simply were not—and would never be—good enough.

Perhaps it was the dream of a life to be spent with that perfect someone that you had finally just met, only to see that dream shattered when you find that your perfect mate doesn’t see you in the same light.

Perhaps it was the dream of building that business you always saw yourself owning , that business that was destined to set the world on its ear and sit up and take notice. Only that dream died, like the others, for any number of possible reasons.

Dreams come in a million different colors and variations and they die in an equally staggering number of different ways.

That a dream we possess struggles and dies a terrible death is not necessarily a tragedy. If we dare to dream we face the likely reality of the death of that dream. The tragedy, however, is to live the rest of our life in mourning that dream, a mourning which robs us of any possibility of dreaming other dreams. And sometimes those dreams will be even greater, even grander, evern more profoundly impacting, than any dream we have previously dreamed. 

There are several things us prospective dreamers need to remember. 

First, if you are afraid of pain, don’t dream. If you can’t face the possibility of seeing your dream die, don’t dream in the first place. The more you dream, the more likely you are to see your dreams die. That is the reality. Face it. Deal with it.

Second, if and when you experience the death of a dream, don’t let the pain of the moment rob you of the invaluable lessons that can be learned in those moments. Stay alert. Keep a clear eye. 

Third, mourn, but only for a set period of time. The loss of a dream, like the loss of any person or possession that we love and value, must be mourned. We must go through the process of letting go. Allow yourself that time. Mourn. Cry. Scream in anger, if necessary. Shout at God a bit. (he understand, by the way).

Then, get up. Pick up the pieces. Clean up. Put a smile on your face. Move on.

Finally, dream the next dream. Songwriter Larry Gatlin penned a wonderful song titled “One Dream Per Customer” in which he asked the question; “Is life a simple matter of one dream per customer, or are we allowed all we dare to dream”. When we are in the midst of dreaming and planning our big dream—THE dream—it is hard for us to imagine and believe that there are more dreams where that came from. There are. Dream again. Yes, you might face another death if you do, but that’s ok. Dream anyway. Never let the death of one dream cause you to abort other dreams that are growing within you.

Dream on, dreamer.