“You can’t always get what you want… but if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need.”
It was the late ‘90s, and I was entering my teenage years when I finally realized this piece of sage advice my father repeatedly offered me wasn’t his at all… it was Mick Jagger’s.
My dad, perpetually cool, was, of course, borrowing his wisdom from the Rolling Stones. I was just too young to know the difference.
But that’s the thing about words of wisdom … it doesn’t really matter whether they came from a song or sermon, a movie or a magazine.
The best words, if strung together just right, take on a life of their own. Eventually, they stop belonging to the people who first wrote them. They get absorbed into everyday life. They become mottos and mantras. They become advice fathers give their children, phrases we share on social media or scribble down in journals, words we repeat to ourselves & carry with us so long we often forget where they even came from. That’s what good words do. They settle into you.
They become part of the lens you see the world through. Over the years, I’ve realized that, thanks to my dad & an aging rock star in impossibly tight pants, that lyrical line has become just that for me— an anthem of sorts.
Not because life has handed me everything I wanted… there’s certainly a lot that I don’t have and probably never will … but, time and time again, life has given me exactly what I need.
– Mackenzie Free –
Wife, mother, photographer & current resident of the unassumingly magical town of Steele, Alabama
