Songwriting Zen reposts Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto as a creative suggestion list for songwriting. I havent' looked at Mau's list recently, so I thought it would be interesting to riff briefly on these one at a time:

1. Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

There's a subtle bias in use of the word "growth", because we can grow more loving, but we can also grow more bitter. We can grow more tolerant or we can grow more judgmental. These are all forms of growth. We change continuously by simply being alive, but sometimes we grow away from our dreams, like the trees on Long Beach yearning to taste the ocean but bent away from it by a relentless wind.

Willingness and openness are absolutely required to grow into our ideals, though. We must willing to open ever wider, and willing to stay open when we least want to. Gradually we can discover that, as philosopher Ken Wilber puts it, life "hurts more and bothers you less."