Connection.
When writing this work, I always have some kind of music playing in the background. Sometimes it’s to inspire a certain frame of mind as I’m writing, and other times it’s to try to free my emotions so that I can write whatever feels like it needs to bubble up to the surface.
It’s always instrumental, because I can’t find my words when listening to someone else’s.
And besides, the music has its own lyrics, if you listen to them. Not words, but emotions; not spoken, but communicated none the less.
In writing this tonight, so that it can be published on Friday morning, I’m listening to the soundtrack from the movie Interstellar. It’s an incredibly haunting, powerful piece that moves me every single time I listen to it.
For some reason, it takes me to a very melancholic and eternal place, with a sense of wonder and sadness intertwined with a loneliness and longing.
It’s not really something I share with anyone, but for some reason, I’m sharing it with you.
I don’t claim to understand why or how music works on our souls. It seems strange to me that vibrations of the very air we use to breathe can evoke such passion, and a sense of togetherness.
How does sound create feelings, and why do certain sounds have the ability to unlock and release our deepest thoughts.
Unless music is really just another way to express and communication our emotions.
Because that’s what connection really is, the ability to communicate and express our emotions in a way that lets us know that someone else can understand that which we struggle to explain as much as we struggle with the experience.
Connection is the resonance of one soul with another, and what better way to do that than by resonating the air, to resonate our souls.
Which leads me back to this particular piece.
There’s something about listening to a combination of piano, pipe organ and the backing of an orchestra that just moves me, especially the pipe organ. It’s strange, because I didn’t grow up in a religious household, quite the opposite.
Yet that sound of the organ, or of a choir vocalizing in an angelic sound just seems to reach inside of me and find something that feels greater than me, and in some way connected with everyone else and the universe.
And at the same time incredibly lonely.
Because in sensing the enormity of the universe, I am reminded of our tiny and essentially inconsequential place within it. Even if we were to unite as a people, as a planet together, we could no more change the direction or the function of the universe than an ant could change the rotation of the earth.
We are smaller than we can possibly understand.
And yet, at the same time, by connecting and coming together, we can become more meaningful and impactful in the lives of each other than we could ever have believed possible.
When we connect with another human being, truly connect, we somehow eliminate that sense of loneliness, and allow ourselves the experience of becoming one with another entity, another consciousness, another experience of the universe different from our own.
We all have a desire to connect, to resonate, to feel and to explore.
May we do so together, and find joy in one another’s experience.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings