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There's something about Leonard (Cohen, that is)....

Every concert has its concession stand with its heaps of over-priced souvenir merchandise, and although Leonard Cohen’s merchandise people were no different the prices were neither grossly inflated nor were the tee shirts the usual rather crass offerings. My favorite was one that read ‘Beautiful Loser’.

Think about that for a moment. We’re all capable of being beautiful - no matter what we look like. Our souls can be beautiful. And, from the age of about fifteen onwards, we’re all losing things; teeth drop out, hair thins, muscles ache or sag. We’re in a losing battle against the forces of entropy and aging, and there’s no way we can get to the end of our lives without having lost a lot of stuff, a lot of battles, a lot of illusions. And then we lose our lives.

So we’re losers. But we’re also beautiful. It’s a Cohen motif, linked to his Buddhist studies.

Put the two words together though, and we get another dimension. Since we’re all losers what matters is if we can be beautiful while we’re losing. This is not the desperate bravado of the gambler, who wants to throw opportunity away as fast as possible. Can we, Leonard asks, see the beauty in ourselves and others, during the process of having everything removed from us, either by chance or our own stupidity? Can we become elegant losers? Can we turn losing into beauty?

One thing is certain. It becomes much more possible to do this when someone has taken the trouble, and the love, to point out what will be required of us - all of us without exception - in the days ahead.