A great lesson he taught me without trying to

From Tweedy's "Starship Casual" blog.  

Jeff Tweedy in an Ezra Klein interview, says, responds to Klein's question about how Tweedy's dad would get upset and go to the basement and would "sit and write a poem and then come upstairs half drunk and read a simplistic, heavily rhyming, but not entirely artless poem about the Alton & Southern Railway, or our neighbor who died, or something else that he’d been stewing about.

That’s a reminder that it can be a natural impulse. And it can have a really direct, natural function in someone’s life. And my dad just accepted that as being a part of how he coped. And I would argue that that’s probably close to how all of this stuff originated. Certainly poetry originates from storytelling and wanting to get things off of someone’s chest and make sure that people know how they’re feeling somewhere, generations to come — oversimplifying, obviously. But yeah, I think that was a really great lesson my dad taught me without trying to.

Tweedy's idea about art being natural, and an impulse just to communicate a feeling, is great.  But I'm especially drawn to the idea of lessons we teach others without trying to.