Always late

Learning the lesson of letting go

Photo by Andy Beales on Unsplash

Listen to this article:

For as long as I can remember, there's been a running joke that my family is known as "The Late Chellews." Apparently, we're famous for our lack of time management skills which makes us late for everything.

I was determined, nay forced, to change my late Chellew ways when I landed a job in radio. Your on-air shift started at the top of the hour, on the dot, not ten minutes after. I broke the late habit and often arrived hours early for my shift, just to be doubly sure lateness was never an issue. That habit has continued. I am now a stickler for being early.

I fully believed I had broken the curse of "The Late Chellews," until I thought a bit deeper about the trajectory of my entire life. In the microcosm, I am now an early Chellew, but in the macrocosm, I have carried on the proud "late" Chellew tradition.

Let me explain.

That radio job I mentioned was my first step in what would become a 20-year-long foray into journalism. That first radio job led to another, where I learned the art of radio news reporting. That led to a job in the major market of Atlanta as a reporter and anchor for WGST radio. That led to my first job in television as an associate producer helping to launch Good Day Atlanta on WAGA-TV. That led to a job at CNN where I worked in the now-defunct CNNRadio as a producer and anchor, then on to duties on the website at CNN Interactive and finally WiresCNN, which is the breaking news desk in the main newsroom.

During all this time, though, the business of radio, television, and especially the news, was changing. CNN and other cable networks began to move away from straight-up newscasts to more pundit/opinion driven shows (it's cheaper to pay a pundit who pontificates from a chair than it is to pay an entire news crew to go to breaking news sites). Radio stations were shedding their non-money-making news departments, or demanding they provide more "infotainment" that the sales department could sell to sponsors. Radio stations were also automating more of their programming or joining the right-wing radio talk show bandwagon (especially AM stations hungry for something to sell to sponsors), which means fewer local DJ jobs.

Most of these changes can be traced back to President Ronald Reagan's gutting of the Fairness Doctrine that required radio and television stations with public broadcasting licenses to present fair coverage of controversial issues. This meant executives understood that newsrooms would not be profit centers. Such rules, however, do not apply to cable news networks, which led to the advent of Fox News in 1996. It's been downhill ever since with partisanship taking over the airwaves.

I left CNN and mainstream media behind in 2002. I was barely hanging on – coming home crying most nights from the stress and awfulness of the job. The events of 9/11 forced my hand as it revealed how callous and profit-driven journalism had become. I got out.

During my 6-year-long stint at CNN, I was finishing up my master's degree in theology at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. I went into academic public relations at Georgia State University, and later the University of South Carolina (because promoting the work of professors is far less icky than promoting products and such) as I pursued my next calling – being a pastor.

I suppose I should have noticed the foreshadowing of my next venture when I told my boss at CNNRadio that I was in seminary and he quipped, "From one low paying career to the next!" Indeed, being a pastor never paid the bills on its own, though it was always part-time pay for full-time work. I still had to keep a full-time job (or a series of freelance part-time gigs) to make ends meet. I still work full-time in a journalism-adjacent field, creating and editing newsletters for associations.

I spent the next 20 years as a pastor – first as an associate pastor for a Metropolitan Community Church that morphed into a United Church of Christ congregation, then as the founder and leader of an independent spiritual community. I loved the job, until I didn't. I can blame the quarantines of COVID-19 for decimating what was already a small gathering and then the herculean effort it took trying to find the funds to keep going took all the joy out of the endeavor for me. Now, as a retired pastor, I get it. Rolling over on Sunday morning instead of going to church is so much more satisfying.

Now, I'm at a crossroads. What to pursue next? Giving up the pastoring gig has given me a bit more free time, so I am pursuing one of my more latent passions – music. I have written songs since I was a teenager, but only started seriously playing guitar again around 10 years ago. I have honed my songwriting craft over the past few years and am producing more and more songs. I regularly play at open mics and have landed a few gigs of my own. It's really exciting … but where is this going?

Then it hit me … I am still one of "The Late Chellews." Every single industry I have attempted to make it in is on a downward trajectory. I am late to the heyday of each one of them. Radio and television are on the decline. The quality of journalism is deteriorating as the demands for infotainment, partisan talking heads, and sensationalism have stifled true journalistic integrity. The church, too, is in decline, with the exception of some megachurches who have turned religion into the same kind of infotainment that radio and TV have discovered brings in the eyeballs and money. Same with the music industry. It's not about being discovered and signed up to a label. These days it's about getting millions of listens on streaming services just to make a few bucks. The labor of the talent is no longer rewarded, just exploited by those at the top. Maybe it's always been that way, though, and now it's just more obvious.

Here I am, still late to every party I've tried to attend throughout my life.

I told this story to my loving spouse the other day and she asked, in her irritatingly wise fashion, "What's the lesson in all of that?"

I crossed my arms. I wasn't looking for a lesson. But there it was.

I believe we all come into this life to learn lessons. We all have karma to burn off, experiences to have, things to be learned – or relearned, depending on past experience.

My lateness to all the parties in this life has given me a chance to learn the lesson of letting go. In all of my careers, a choice-point arrived. Will I stay and be miserable or will I let go and allow something new to emerge?

Each time, I have let go. I am still writing songs and singing them in public, but I must let go of the idea that my music will support me in some material fashion. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but the point of doing the music isn't for fame and fortune. It's because the music insists that I make it. I have tried to not write songs, and I always fail. A song comes, I write it down, and I sing it. I let go of whatever I need it to be and allow it to be what it wants to be.

Isn't that the purpose of every moment of letting go? We remove our expectations from whatever we're clinging to. We're allowing it to become whatever it wants to be, not whatever limitations we seek to put on it. Indeed, I have seen some ads for jobs in the TV and radio industry that I could do. I could also just start up a new spiritual community.  But that would be moving backwards. If you have truly let go of things in the past that you loved doing (and being), then there is little, to no, temptation to go back.

Alas, despite my best efforts, I remain a "late Chellew" – late to this party called life, watching things I thought would sustain me walk out the door. I can choose to mourn them, cling to them, try to go back to them, or make them my "good old days." Or I can bless them, thank them for the experiences they've given me as their gift, and let them go. Karmically, that's a move that's always right on time.

---

Music for the Journey:

“It’s Too Late” — Carole King

One of us is changin',
or maybe we've just stopped tryin'

---

Upcoming Speaking Gigs:

May 5, 2024: Clayton Memorial Unitarian Universalist Church - Newberry, SC

May 12, 2024: Jubilee! Community in Asheville, NC

June 23, 2024: The Unitarian Church in Charleston, SC

Past Guest Speaking Gigs:

This is the sermon I delivered at the Unitarian Church in Charleston, S.C., on January 28, 2024. (Stick around at the end to hear my original song, “I Believe.”)

Looking for a guest speaker at your spiritual community? Contact me!

---

About the Motley Mystic:

The Motley Mystic is an online community for people who have realized that the truth speaks with many voices. There is no one religion, philosophy, institution, or dogma that captures the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth. No one needs to swear allegiance to one line of thought or belief to discern Truth, because Love is the only thing that’s real. That’s what we explore at the Motley Mystic - all the tools and strategies we need to remove our barriers to Love and live fully as our true Divine Self.

Candace Chellew is the founder of Motley Mystic as well as Jubilee! Circle, an interfaith spiritual community in Columbia, S.C. She is also the author of Bulletproof Faith: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Gay and Lesbian Christians published in 2008 by Jossey-Bass and the founder and senior editor emeritus of Whosoever: An Online Magazine for LGBTQ People of Faith. She is also a musician and avid animal lover.