A Musical Note

There's something almost spiritual about lying in total darkness listening to your favourite song. With the headphones in and the volume up, the inside of your head becomes a concert hall for an audience of one. Your other four senses numb and you just absorb the sound while it absorbs you. That's the power of good music, the sort of music you connect with.

Music often becomes associated with the best and the worst moments of people's lives; hearing songs can take you back to times and places long forgotten, instantly recapturing emotions of years past. I can remember crying myself to sleep listening to some songs while others remind me of a time when I felt a sense of possibility that now eludes me. Good times and bad times, much of life has a soundtrack. Not in a cheesy, pop kind of way - like holiday snaps set to the latest number one single - but on a far deeper level, where a song perfectly encapsulates how you feel at a particular point in time and becomes permanently imprinted with that emotion so that every time you hear it you're reminded of your former self. It's a symbiotic relationship in a lot of ways; music has the power to influence your mood and inspire you but at the same time you are able to project your own thoughts and feelings into songs so that they become uniquely meaningful for you in a way that other people who hear the song will never know.

Songs become people, places, and raw emotions, forming an aural record of your life. When I actually think about how many songs take me back to a place or a time or a person meaningful to me, I come up with dozens. I often enjoy taking long road-trips by myself because it gives me a chance to just listen to many of those songs. For three or four minutes it's just me, the road, and a reminder of who I used to be or how I used to feel and then, for the next three or four minutes it's another memory and another outmoded version of myself. You can re-live your life in a few hours. It's a great way to reconnect with yourself, to remember how you used to feel and see how much you have or haven't changed since certain moments in your life.

There's a lot of value in this sort of refection. I think it's one of the best ways to get through a difficult time. If you can remind yourself of a period in your life when you were at your lowest, when you couldn't see how you were ever going to recover and yet you did recover, then that should be enough to give you just a little bit of hope that, even though you may once again be down and don't know how to pick yourself back up again, you'll get through it. That anguish will eventually become just another song in your playlist.