Medium of the Mind
My favorite songs are sad songs.
The melodies, varying in all mediums of sound, tug and strain at pain, anguish, and grief, the strings drawing out loss, longing, sorrow. I listen to these songs again and again- they are timeless and I continue to listen over the years.
When I find my moments to meet the days wears, I do not do away with my sadness with music that is loud, rapturous, or careless. Instead, consciously confronting these emotions, I listen and discover the music to console me in my most inconsolable moments. Allowing the emotions that have been disregarded, pushed aside, and beat down throughout the day, just for a brief few moments of the night, I shut the door, lay down on the floor, press play and let the emotions be released. They pour over my heart, and I let my heart throb with the stress and anxiety that had been confined for so long. Finally, for passing moments, I fully know what the dejection I ignored felt like, the anguish I deflected felt like. My emotional awareness heightens.
While they arouse raw and desolate emotions, evermore meaningful is that these pieces arouse- more wholly and integrally- beauty. To at first only feel my own pains, the steady piano shows how much beauty there is in the harshness of life, the resonant cello shows how much hope there is in the hollowed heartbreaks. For the same reasons that the soaring strings of loss provide comfort, they put forth great beauty amidst the sorrow. As I learn better the emotions swirling inside me, I attain greater awareness of the beauty that waits if I withstand and endure the sufferring that life raises.
The music comforts my mind- a mind continually running, constantly being stretched and twisted with worries of the past, present, and future all knotted together. While I, for the duration of my days, push out discomforts as to focus solely on the task at hand, listening to my favorite melancholy music presents a moment of mindfulness where the music forms a bridge to an existence beyond my own, simultaneously taken to another world, as well as deeper into my own. Even when the music expresses despair I have yet to experience for myself, I now further know the extent of human emotion and the human condition.
The nature of fully experiencing the human condition is not occasional hikes when the Saturday morning air is fresh- it is a continuous, far rougher trudging up mountains, tumbling through ditches, sliding down sudden sheer cliff drops. But the harshest hikes- the toughest destinations to get to- that is where you can find the most beautiful untouched meadows, the clearest shimmering lakes. To endure through the worst of terrains, and to be aware that the path of great curses surrounding so too contains great treasures, that is what will lead to the most beautiful moments in life.
