It is late. I am starting my blog at the time of night when I am usually turning off the light to go to sleep. It has been a full day and a fuller evening, and I am grateful. It is a sweet melancholia that I’m feeling at the moment spurred by time spent listening to old songs that I’ve loved for a long time but haven’t heard lately.
My sister Ruth was visiting my house, she and her children, this evening. We got to playing music videos of songs she loved, and it turned out that some of the songs she loved were ones I’d given her many years ago. There’s a reason why we love them: they speak to a place that resides deep inside of each of us, perhaps in all of us. There’s a yearning that bubbles up from someplace when you listen to certain songs, something in the lyrics and music that strikes a chord in the heart and evokes a particular feeling. After they left tonight, I got out my guitar and started playing and singing. It is a balm to my soul like none other. You’d think I would remember that, but I don’t, not nearly often enough anyway.
“Sing,” my friend joHn always tells me, “just sing.” He is one whom I believe sings no matter else is happening in his life. Music is in him, it is him, and it simply must come out. Perhaps I am a bit like that too, though my music has been buried for many years and remains so, making only brief appearances here and there. I don’t think I was ever meant to be a star musician or recording artist, but I am not likely to ever know that. It is one of those “what might have been” things that I wonder about from time to time. That’s one reason why I started life coaching, to formally begin doing what I’ve spent the better part of my life doing informally–helping people sort out what they want to do with their lives, what they really want to do, not what they often end up doing because they’re following someone else’s plan.
“To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure the opportunity to do it is the key to happiness,” the educator John Dewey said way back in 1923. The language is a little archaic, but the sentiment is not. I paraphrase those words a lot when I talk to folks about their lives. If you discover what you are meant to do, uniquely prepared to engage with as your life work and then find the way to do it, you are fortunate indeed. So I spend time here and there talking with people–all kinds of people–about what they want to do with the skills and gifts and talents they’ve been given. And if there’s music in them, gosh, they have to be able to get it out: both literal and figurative music.
I am grateful for the gift of song. I’ve been playing and singing and songwriting for many, many years now. So as I write, in the background the music of singer-songwriters is playing–people who took the path in the direction that their talent took them. They overcame their fears, self-doubts, other obstacles that perhaps temporarily hindered or sidetracked them. I played my guitar and sang for nearly an hour before I gently tucked her back in her case where she’ll remain until I am inspired again to pull her out and reconnect with the piece of my soul that resides in the music.
It has indeed been a rich day. I will go to sleep tonight hearing the songs in my head, feeling them in my heart. They will flow through my dreams and be with me when I wake in the morning ready to greet the new day. And I will be grateful.
