Why did you come here?

News of the sudden death of Michael Jackson prompted a train of thoughts and memories about music, talent, life and its purpose.

I was born in the same year as Michael Jackson. I was a few days old when the Munich plane crash wiped out most of what must have been the most promising club team English football had ever produced up to that point, and a year old when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died in another crash in Iowa. Both disasters killed hugely talented young men in their twenties or even teens, with so much to offer the world. It must have been the last thing any of them were expecting.

I admit that both of these faraway events rather passed me by at the time, but I do remember the Jackson Five appearing on the scene in the late sixties and early seventies. Songs like "I want you back" and "The love you say" brought me out in goose bumps even then, and I still think they're among the best pop ever produced. But Michael Jackson peaked early, in my view. Not long afterwards, he brought out what I think was his first solo single, a syrupy song called "Ben" about his pet rat, and I stopped listening to him. By the time the rest of the world got so excited about "Thriller", I had long since switched off, and have never been able to perceive his "later" (post-1972) music as anything other than superficial.

But of course I was aware of his fame, his wealth and the strange stories that always seemed to surround him. I have no clear idea which if any of the rumours might have been true, but he always seemed to me like someone who spent his life searching: for love, for the childhood he was never allowed to have, for real, deep satisfaction; ultimately, the hunger for a knowledge of God which underlies all our yearnings.

And now, suddenly, he's gone.

Despite all Jackson's success, it doesn't look to me as if he ever found what he was searching for. He seemed a larger than life illustration of the saying, "What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?" Hearing of his death is making me evaluate my own life and priorities. I believe we all, in a sense, chose to come here, chose to be incarnated into this life, this time, this place, and there is a purpose in doing so that we need to discover.

Other musicians seem to have found theirs. Sometimes it means the end of their musical careers, sometimes not. Bono has committed to spend the rest of his life working to end poverty. Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil left the band (who decided to wind up as a result) to go into the Australian Parliament as Environment Minister in Kevin Rudd's administration. Even less famously, I recently learned that Lee Parvis of the Oysterband has hung up his drumsticks to concentrate on his work as a prison psychotherapist; I had seen the Oysters many times in concert and on the basis of Lee's appearance, was not surprised to learn of his prison connections, but the psychotherapist bit was news to me.

And in each of those cases, the last, or most recent, albums those people released was, in my view, of lasting value. U2's "No line on the horizon" has not been off my MP3 player since it got onto it; "Magnificent" is one of the best songs of worship I've ever heard. Midnight Oil's "Capricornia" seemed to sum up all that was best about the peak of their career, the sublime albums "Diesel and Dust", "Blue Sky Mining" and "Earth and Sun and Moon". And the Oysterband's "Meet you there", the last one Lee played on, is nearly as good as their two earlier albums that form part of the soundtrack of my life, "Deserters" and "Holy Bandits".

All of these musicians seem, from what little I know about them, to have found their path in life; and a side effect has been a deepening and renewing of their music at a relatively advanced age. I could mention others: Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Cockburn, Yusuf Islam. Yet that kind of true maturity and (I imagine) true satisfaction seems to have eluded Michael Jackson right up to his sudden end.

We never know when it's coming, or whether it will be sudden or gradual. Now is the time to intuit or discover our life purpose if we don't already know it, and to live it out as best we can, whether it's a deepening of our current path or a courageous leap onto a completely new one.

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Update, three days later: I find it sad and ironic that at least part of what led to Michael Jackson's death was apparently the stress of preparing for a long string of concerts he had agreed to give in order to try and earn his way out of debt. And now his records are selling better than they have for years, presumably leading to lots of money accruing to his estate that, had it arrived in time, might have saved him from working himself to death.

I think it's always better to express appreciation for people while they're still alive. Feel free to leave yours here. As far as I'm aware, there's no particular hurry in my case, but you never know, I suppose.