I am a singer. It has been hard being unable to sing with my ensemble group and choir this past year and a half. We had a brief window of singing together, which is unfortunately closing again due to this pesky Delta variant — breathing heavily in a closed room is just not a wise activity these days. The value of singing and music has thus been much on my mind…
Music has a way of bypassing the conscious mind and going straight to the heart. The right kind of music is kind of like affirmation in song. It has a deeper effect on us than we perhaps imagine. We often have a car commercial jingle (or worse!) floating around in our heads. Why not put something in there of uplifting and lasting value?
One of my favorite phrases from the music I sing and listen to is:
Some people think to harvest happiness
By weeding troubles… easing every stress
The trouble is that troubles never end
Get rid of one… and you find its friend
What a great message and a wealth of wisdom in those words. Trying to clean the beach by picking up each grain of sand one at a time and polishing it is… well… perhaps a touch on the futile side. We somehow feel that if we can only get our circumstances just right we’ll be happy at last. Oh, and then of course we need to freeze everything in place lest it be merely “too good to last.”
I encourage everyone I spend time with to listen to uplifting beautiful music. Better than car commercials!
Here’s a link to the song quoted above, if you’d like to hear it. But whatever your taste in music, especially during this odd time in our country, I encourage you to choose carefully and find something that will help bring you to where you want to be.