Time to rediscover the world
Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay
When I was younger, I listened to music a lot. It made me feel good. The emotional connection was very strong. Music is the reason that I devoted my life to the science of sound. I wanted to understand how and why pressure variations in air can make your hair stand on end, when the oscillations occur in a specific organized way. Although that is just a fancy way of describing a song that gives you goosebumps. Either way, it is immensely fascinating!
There is a difference between listening to music while doing something else simultaneously and focused listening, the kind when you do nothing else simultaneously. It is common to listen to music while working or driving or walking… or just about anything. It makes time pass faster. However, if you are doing cognitively demanding work, I find it too distracting to listen to music. The past two years since I joined Acouwood, I have constantly been so focused while working that I have stopped listening to music entirely. It is rare when I get a work task that can be performed with the “auto-pilot” engaged, something that I suspect is crucial if you are going to listen to music. But something else also happened a couple of years ago.
When taking my PhD I came into (real) contact with philosophy for the first time. A new world appeared, when I truly learned how to examine a given problem from as many viewpoints as possible. A skill that is crucial for any scientist. Around the same time, I discovered podcasts and audiobooks. Shortly thereafter, many things in my belief system that I held for true came crashing down. It is as if you get to see all the hidden wires and trap doors on a magic performance. You cannot see the “magic” ever again. It cannot be “un-seen”. I realized that there were so many things to learn and study in the humanities, so I basically stopped listening to music and started to listen to podcasts and audiobooks every woken hour. To put things into perspective, I “read” about 100 audiobooks in one year – excluding the podcasts. But I couldn’t get enough, I wanted to learn more! And here I am now, husband, father of two, partner and business owner and associate professor. All because I discovered the power of books and completely re-routed my life.
Let’s go back to music. Before, I could just listen to music and enjoy it, but I rarely thought about the underlying meaning and message of the song. I only listened at the music and melodies and didn’t care much for the lyrics. And music IS about philosophy and values. After studying the humanities, I found what my values really are (by writing them down) and consequently, some songs that I could listen to before do not attract me at all now and can even feel repulsive. And of course, I have discovered other songs that I didn’t know about instead.
Good music can give you goosebumps and it is a magic feeling. It captures you and you cannot do anything about it. Listening to lectures on philosophy can have a similar effect. Maybe not as often, but when you get the goosebumps from a lecture, they tend to be much, much stronger! It typically occurs when something extremely important snaps into place within you.
These past months however, I have gotten pretty fed up with the extremely cognitively demanding lectures and books about philosophy. Instead, I have started to listen to music again. And I still get the goosebumps but in a different way. It is as if I have grown as a person and expanded my mind so that I can understand what it is that resonates. That is something different than when my younger self got the goosebumps and didn’t understand why. When you become a parent, you will discover the world again through your child. You cannot understand how fascinating and amazing it is when the wind rattles the leaves in a tree. But your two-year old sees it instantly and his mind is blown. And you stop and think for a second: “Yes, that is quite amazing actually. I had forgot about that when I became an adult”. The same thing happened when I got my first dog. The puppy was completely captured by a reflection from a window in the floor once. I remember thinking, “What is going on? Why is he so fascinated by that spot of light?” And then I realized that he had never seen a spot of light before. Of course it is fascinating. And through the dogs eyes, I rediscovered the world.
I now look forward to start listening to music again. Here, my past self is the child, and my current self – I – am the parent. Time to rediscover the world!