Windfall Found

Who Are You?

That’s the title of a reading I was given back in September on my first day of class. Who are you? A bold question. I’m sure for many, that question would be uncomfortable or intimidating, but it wasn’t for me. Because I’d already answered it before.

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Since I was 15, my friends and I have created music together. We’re a ‘band’, but the ‘band’ has always meant more to us than being ‘a band’. It’s an outlet, a forum, a dialogue for us as people. When we started playing music, it would’ve been easy to pay a local-studio to record us playing worse versions of our favourite songs, but that never seemed appealing. In our lives, we were all set up with opportunities and possibilities for our future; although, school, sports or work never fully felt like a real platform. Instead, it was our basement, stacked with instruments, amps and microphones that gave us what we needed: a blank canvas. A place to get to know ourselves. Without limits. Uncompromising. 

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In my reading, Who Are You?, the author, Derick Jensen, suggests everyone is searching for their story; learning how to fill the gap between birth and death. While it seems like the default is to look for happiness in pleasures and for satisfaction in ‘upward mobility’, Jensen proposes that we’re meant for something quite different:

“…service to something greater than [ourselves] is far more likely to lead to a joyful and satisfying life.. [and] it all starts with the question: What’s the biggest and most important problem I can solve with my gifts and skills”

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Our work as WindfallFound has served us as a way to explore our story; to both understand it and communicate it. When looking at the blank canvas, we were forced to ask, 'Who Are We?’. The process of writing songs, crafting recordings, playing concerts.. it was all a dialogue for answering that question. And through it all, we've gotten to know ourselves. We’ve started to know ‘the biggest and most important problem’ that we can solve, so that each of us can move towards that 'joyful and satisfying life’. This is likely the first of a few reflective posts about the band, so I’ll wait to elaborate on what that looks like. For now, I only want to establish one thing: Our goal for WindfallFound has always been to establish who we are; its been a process of realizing ourselves and where we fit in the world. And by answering that bold question, hopefully whatever we send out to the world can help others answer it too.