How little we know

Watched the Kennedy Center Honors on TV this evening. Brian Wilson was one of the honorees. I loved the Beach Boys' music, still do, but I haven't paid much (read: any) attention to the pop music scene in years. So I missed hearing about Wilson's struggles with mental illness, drug abuse, weight gain, loss of the creative spark that made him such a seminal figure and his comeback in recent years. None (or very little) of this was mentioned on the show, but he looked so uncomfortable, so stiff and wooden, almost like he'd had a stroke, that I couldn't help noticing. It took my cousin's telling me about all of it to make me aware. And what I thought was, we go along taking pleasure in things created for us by others, blithely unaware (and not wanting to be) of what their lives may feel like, what the giving takes from them. We just want more of what we like. Made me sad for him in a way I can't be very articulate about yet, and that I owed him an apology.