The Man Who Only Sings One Song

There’s a man in Jerusalem.

One of the few.

Every day, you’ll see him if you’re walking around the right area.

He’s singing. Singing the same song he sings every day. You can sit there for an hour, and he’ll sing the same song. You can’t really make out the words. You can hardly make out the tune.

Every day he’s out there. Singing, crooning.

It’s so easy to make fun of him, out there, singing the same song, this really horrible song, over and over.

I used to laugh at him.

But then, the more I came out there, the more I saw him out there. Singing, singing, singing.

I would see other people laughing at him. The way I laughed at him.

They were walking around, joking, smiling giggling. Still, he sang.

Today, I sat outside, in an area appropriately dubbed “Crack Square”, and watched him sing for an hour. People walked past him, laughing as usual. But if you sit there long enough you notice more. You notice the guy who stands behind him and pretends to kick him. You notice the tons of people that laugh directly in his face. You notice someone try to take his money, and how he has to chase him off.

But nothing phases him. He keeps singing. Keeps singing the same one song (I think I heard him mix it up once, but maybe he just changed a note). Keeps on keeping on.

If you’ll believe it, the guy actually released a CD. I have to buy it.

The more I’m around this guy, the more I realize how easy it is to laugh. How easy it is to make fun. To point, push around, mock behind of or in front of. Life is easy when we think it exists for our entertainment. When we think it’s just a popcorn movie.

I realize that it’s easy to laugh because we know how much harder it is to go out there and sing. How much harder it is to go out and tell the world the same one note over and over, whatever it happens to be. How much harder it is, especially when we’ve been the laughers, when we know how easy it is to laugh at those guys out there on the front lines.

But in the end, it’s this guy who’s sung a song. It’s this guy who’s out there. In the end, he’s singing one more song than everybody who’s laughing. In the end, he’s the one without fear, without reservation, singing, singing, singing.

And in the end, I’d rather be singing one song, with one note, for my entire life, than being a laugher, on the sidelines, mocking, mocking, mocking.

How about you?


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