Since I was a kid, I’ve pretty much always had music on.
At 7 years old, I was this little Chinese girl with crooked bangs bopping to Coolio and TLC on my cassette player.
During my obsession with EDM remixes in high school, my mom irritatingly asked me to “stop playing the same dee-dee-dee song". Fact: they were different songs, but I will admit that they all sounded like Sandstorm and I played them constantly.
And now, I usually have Spotify or YouTube playing in the car or background.
But recently, I’ve experienced the yearn to listen to music yet an unsatisfying, even uncomfortable, sensation when I actually put something on.
My first response was to try new music, but that didn’t work. And it wasn’t me being cynical, like “Gosh darn it, Sally, they just don’t make ‘em like they used to.”
Over time, I started to get the idea that maybe the craving wasn’t for music at all— at least not in the traditional sense.
See, over and over, we’re told to “listen to ourselves” and, as cheesy as it sounds, I wondered if that’s what I was craving— listening to myself.
So I’ve been practicing being quiet and not listening to any music when I get this craving. And at first, it was hard. I just started doing other things.
Today I woke up with this sense of anxiety, as I often do. Usually it involves thinking about all the mundane things I have to do, like exercise, cook, clean, or go to work, and how it seems to be so plain and meaningless.
And usually, I respond by thinking about how I’m not talented or hard working enough to have the creative, fulfilling life I want— in other words, I was doomed to be unhappy from the beginning because I am just inherently flawed/lacking.
Instead of going down that familiar pattern of thinking, I tried to tune into myself. I wanted to go deeper, below what I knew was anxiety on the surface, and try to get to the core of my experience.
What came to me was the image and sensation of what can only be described as music notes. I felt/heard this low but shiny drawn out sound, as if someone had drawn a bow fully across the strings of a cello, and then on top of it, smaller notes going up and down in a dynamic, slightly frenetic, bubbling fashion.
I realized it was a helpful way to frame my anxiety about my life. My daily events are these small notes, yet there is some underlying larger sound occurring. And even more, all of it, even those tiny notes, are part of a larger movement or section of music. Alone, they may not make sense, but together, they are building up to a piece of art.
I don’t know what the whole movement sounds like, or where its going, but I do know that thinking about the small moments being undergirded by a longer sound and being part of a bigger musical unfolding shifted me from an existential anxiety to a spiritual excitement. I felt like I was a part of something bigger, and that woven into the threads of my life was an ever-revealing magic.
Now, listening to myself has taken on a different meaning, and I have been given a fresh and compelling way to view the events of my life when I feel like all is disconnected, isolated, and meaningless— as notes in a song I am expressing through my life, and to trust that this song has a melody, a rhythm, an underlying purpose that ties it together.
I wonder if for you, too, there is a way to think about your life as music, and if so, what can you figure out about how the music sounds and how, if at all, does it help you to think about your life in that way?