Just saw Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in “Deliver Me From Nowhere.” In the movie, Bruce’s songs are a mash up of past and present. It’s all relevant when it comes to creativity. That’s sort of how life is at times, too. At least, that’s what I noticed in researching my forthcoming book: “Belonging to Bethlehem: Stories from the Christmas City’s Jewish Community,” spanning 100 years.

The backdrop events of those years show that what goes around comes around, like the merry-go-round in one scene of the movie.

It’s easy to get a little too caught up in the carnival — whether our own personal daily dramas, national politics, or anything in between. So many incidentals in the book seemed, when I began my research in 2010, mere trivia. Back then, it felt like things were on the upswing after the market instability of ’06-’08. 

A pandemic, immigration controversy, childhood disease outbreaks, civil unrest … Ancient history, right? Then we descended into 2020 and beyond.

Yet like Bruce’s river in “Hungry Heart,” the one that “don’t know where it’s flowing,” things just kept going. 

Crises don’t last.

We could take comfort in the cyclical nature of events, which offers the pendulum’s swing of escape from hard times and controversy. Things get bad, like when they “blew up the chicken man” in another of Bruce’s songs. And then they get better. Or as Bruce would say, “Maybe everything that dies, someday comes back …”

If we’re lucky, that upswing will lead to something really beautiful, as heard in the refrain and ending of that chicken man song; as seen in the creative outpouring of swirled memories, a book, an album, a win, a work project or initiative; … or a feeling, of sheer joy, when Bruce once again sings, “Meet me tonight in Atlantic City!”

Photo attribution: Kritzolina, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons; page link.