The Soundtrack of Life - a mindset study
I was sitting here this morning thinking about the difference between myself and my spouse Veronica and our choice in music. She often listens to the blues. I often listen to uplifting, music that creates feelings of happiness. There’s literally a collection of songs on my music app called “The Happy Mix”. I listen to this often, particularly when I travel. It keeps me in the right frame of mind for all of the things happening around me while in transit. I find myself feeling distressed when I listen to the blues with my spouse. We’re usually in the car, and she always needs driving music. After listening for awhile, and after 10 years of listening, I’m now singing along. Then I begin marveling to her how she can listen to people lamenting about their life all of the time. All that cheating and lying and general sadness is disheartening. When I start doing that, she never really answers me, she just changes the music to India Arie or something to make me sing along and dance in my seat. Remember I said, we’ve been married almost 10 years!
Music is the soundtrack of life. If your life is a film, music expresses the genre of the life you are creating. And the music of film is often how people choose to express the life they are having. I definitely live life in a Rom Com, and “Lovely Day” is my new karaoke song. At another time in my life, I would have said my life was a musical. I was always singing and dancing no matter where I was. To this day I still find myself singing songs from old musicals from Grease to Mary Poppins or An American in Paris particularly when I get around my sister.
Other songs from films have been so pervasive that I can’t listen to them ever again. My old neighbor in NYC, who was going through a break-up, every day around 6 or 630 PM would blast “Kiss from a Rose”, for six long months. I think anything from Celine Dion could go on the list, but I had another person’s break-up ruin “My Heart Will Go On”. In an interesting reversal, the song from Frozen “Let It Go” was ruined for me before I ever saw the movie. Confession: I was determined to never see Frozen and I didn’t until 4 years ago when it was part of a sermon lesson at the spiritual center that summer. Because I understand and appreciate the message. I can tolerate “Let It Go” now.
What does your current soundtrack sound like? If you were going to write the film of your life, as you want it to be, what kind of soundtrack would it need?
I realized that I can’t listen to music that is expressing my pain any longer because it causes me to live in a space of suffering. I remember being in junior high, high school, into college, and my early 20s, sad music was expressing all of the pain I didn’t have the courage to express. I wrote sad poetry in my journal and listened to sad music. It’s as I’m writing this, I finally realized when and why I stopped. The year I came out, I stopped listening to music to reflect my pain. I started choosing music to express how I wanted to feel and the life I wanted to be creating. I chose music to express my joy of living as my Authentic Self.
“We all have a journey. Yours is yours and mine is mine. We are all stars of our own stories and no matter what challenges life brings, you can always count on your powerful spirit to keep you going. ”
We’re going to talk about this again, because I want to introduce you to my friend that scores films. And then really get into how you create the soundtrack for a journey. Right now I’ll leave you with this…what’s on your current playlist? What kind of life film are you creating? Is this the life you say you want? Consider choosing the music to reflect the life you want, the life you say is the life of your vision, a life that rocks!
R
