Last night, as I was going to bed, a song popped into my head: “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead. I want to be clear: I’m no Deadhead. I’ve always sort of wondered what all the fuss was about with the Dead and bands like them, the kind of bands whose fans literally follow them around the country to shows. I’ve never listened to much Grateful Dead music at all.
Back in the early ‘90s, when I first came up to Silicon Valley and joined my very first startup, this was the pre-smartphone, pre-Spotify, pre-streaming era. This was the era of CDs. We all worked together in one office, there was a single CD player, and people took turns putting music on; the whole office had to listen to whatever got picked. I’m pretty sure I put on Social Distortion more than once, being a kid who grew up in Orange County during the punk scene, and I still listen to Social D to this day. I probably annoyed or flat-out pissed off a lot of people with that, since it’s not exactly relaxing to code while Social D is blasting in the background.
There was a guy named David K, a friend of one of our co-founders Michael H, who had moved out to California from the East Coast. We all worked together in that same office, and Dave put in a lot of different CDs over time. Several of them were Grateful Dead tracks. Those CDs, close to 30 or 40 years ago now, were my one and only real introduction to the Dead and to the song “Ripple.”
For some reason, after all these years, that song popped into my head as I was lying down last night, and it was still there when I woke up this morning. So, this being the modern age, I picked up my phone, opened Spotify, and put the track on. I’ve listened to it a few times now since this morning.
I know why it popped into my head right now. I’ve been going through some hard times trying to get my life back on the right track. I don’t know what everybody else thinks about that song, but to me it’s very clearly about God, and about your personal relationship with God. The central metaphor - “ripple in still water when there is no pebble tossed nor wind to blow” - is to me unmistakably about that relationship. The ripple represents a sign from God, a sign that doesn’t come from the hand of man. No man causes it. Only God can.
The song also talks, I think very clearly, about the path we’re all on between birth and death, and about how, in a very real sense, we walk that road alone responsible for what happens on it. There’s a line I keep coming back to: “you who choose to lead must follow”. To me, that means if you want people to follow your example on that road between birth and death, you first have to follow the example set by others.
I’ll admit that as I write this, I’m crying. I’m having a hard time getting through it, because of how powerful these words are at any point in your life, but especially at the points where you feel like you’ve been on the wrong road, following the wrong example, setting the wrong example for other people. It’s a powerful reminder to make sure you know which road you’re on.
So maybe now I finally know what all the fuss is about. Because this is some of the finest poetry I have ever read or heard. If there are other Grateful Dead songs like this one the band deserves every bit of credit and acclaim they’ve ever gotten.