Music awakens the moment
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 2019-11-10

So this past week I've had a fairly serious, businesslike kind of attitude, working on just doing work and being happy with doing work, and it's easy to kind of slip into a too-serious mentality, and really, mindsets, I believe, can be very brittle. 
If we don't have enough humour and looseness, then we can just become too tight and brittle to the point where we become less resilient. 
So good humour and looseness is, I think, an essential part of being resilient and able to deal with life. 
Now, I wasn't thinking about that yesterday. 
Yesterday I was just continuing a week of work. 
But then at the end of the week I just started to listen to some songs. 
And at first I was putting on some songs while I was cleaning my apartment. 
So this is just some background entertainment while I continued to work, as I continued to do cleaning. 
But after the first few songs, it started to become more about dancing, with less and less cleaning going on, and eventually it just became purely listening to songs, dancing around, and by around midnight, despite having- I had nothing to drink or smoke, but I really felt high from the music. 
It really- it's amazing how just listening to songs that we love and dancing around can really change the mindset. 
And it really- it made me too too pumped up to be able to sleep. 
And simply from these songs and the power of these songs. 
So I thought about what is it that makes this effect? There's something about music that triggers- it changes the way that we look at the moment. 
It changes our perception of time. 
I mean, that's what music is all about. 
Music is an effect made through rhythm, through patterns in time. 
And when we have that song playing, either out there coming in or it's a song playing in our minds, it changes how we respond to the passage of time. 
It kind of, like, get into that repeating pattern, and it starts to have an energy of its own. 
It seems like the beats in music is certainly analogous to the heartbeat, and the breath, because those are the basic rhythms of our bodies, our heartbeat and breath. 
And music sort of seems to play with that and work with that, setting a steady rhythm and an exciting repeating pattern, such that it really brings excitement to life. 
It really brings the feeling that there's something alive in the moment, that there is- it's not just- I mean, if you compare it to that kind of silence - which I could make a whole other video about the wonders of silence, and that's a wonderful thing too, to just have complete silence - but the contrast of the music playing is really like an excitement of something happening in the moment, and the feeling of being alive. 
So that's a big part of this idea of the meaningful life, is this feeling of aliveness, and music is something that can really help to bring it out. 
Now, I know that this was affected by me not doing this too much for a long time, so it sort of came out fresh. 
I know it's easy to become overstimulated on the music, and simply it just kind of becomes noise and filler in the mind. 
But if we allow our minds to empty out and be silent, then when that music comes back, it really hits powerfully. 
So I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do with this new realization, but I feel a little bit different today. 
There's a little bit more spring in my step. 
And it seems like this is something that we can use. 
It's a tool for setting our mindset, and we can use music to increase a sense of intensity in the moment. 
And sometimes that's something that can be missing when there's too much work. 
So, it's the weekend now. 
I'm going to enjoy some music. 
And tomorrow it's back to work, but the music is yet another tool in the toolbox for adjusting our mindset and developing our approach to life.