When you sit alone, holding nothing but your thoughts, the mind plays records with occasional skips, some skips that make sense and some that don't but that you feel will ultimately, have meaning. Whenever I know I'm going to sit still, I put on my headphones and sit back, awaiting the next adventure that my imagination so eagerly creates for me. It has always been like this. Since I can remember I have been retreating from reality, back into myself and my thoughts, painting prettier pictures of my life for myself so as not be to be disappointed by the real one that lies outside of my fantasies.
Of course even without the music I would still retreat inside, playing my own film of life, but as anyone today will tell you, no movie is complete without mood music.
Victor Hugo said that "music expresses that which cannot be put into words, and cannot remain silent." It takes a composer to put the complexity of human emotion into notes, a performer to translate it to the masses, and a writer to describe it in words that are understandable to the rest. Even the best of the best could not describe the intense phenomena that is human life.
It is not until you are alone, with nothing but these thoughts, that you realize and regard the importance of each moment, acquaintance, thought, feeling, adventure, conversation, etc. I believe everyone practices this art of inner voicing, and I don't suppose to be the only one who just simply adds music to it. I'm not a particularly complex individual in the real world, but in my thoughts I can weave the scenes of my life together to make tragedies, inspirational tales, romantic comedies, and anything in between.
I can experience the most vigorous sides of anger and feelings of injustice and helplessness, as well as nostalgia that in today's society would only be considered cliché and overused during these times by myself. I don't have any special powers, I'm not a prodigy of musical languages or an especially astounding character among people my age. But that does not stop me from being alone in the right that I perform this ritual so often and seek to understand and convey it to people who do not seem to notice that they too have this ability, they too are made from the same stuff as me even if they do not wish to see it or do not think to experience it.
Sometimes I wish that I could play the music on loud speakers in the sky all day to my life. Each scene or part would correspond perfectly with the genre, making it easier to experience life with more gratitude and awe. Gratitude. Gratitude. Would we act differently if this were the case? Of course not, no one person is made the same as the next, my own mother does not understand the importance of my intrinsic retreats. I can only hope that the more I experience, the more I read, the more I listen closely and learn, the better I will become at helping her to understand why it's necessary. This is me as a person, I cannot become what I want or do what I know will make me happy without constantly replaying the good and the bad lessons and experiences that I have had. This is my tool for forgiving myself for my mistakes, congratulating myself for small endeavors, for reminding myself to feel lucky for the people that I know and the seconds that go by.
We are the but a piece of sand in the hourglass of history, and yet it has commonly been for an individual not to understand what they have around them until their later years. Of course enjoy life to it's fullest, but the younger you realize what 'the fullest' means the more you will be able to influence a few more grains of sand later on. If Shakespeare had written 20 more plays, if Keats had penned but a few more metaphors, if Darwin had discovered Evolution but a mere 10 years earlier... what could they have contributed to today. We all have something to say, and some of us want to say it forever, for why do we have children but to teach what we have learned to someone who can continue to carry it long after we're gone.
I bring a new meaning to the nature of indulging. I have been accused in the past of devaluing myself out of habit for everything that I do, the reason I can never see the truth in this statement is because I indulge inwardly in a way that no one can see. The nature of indulgence in my mind is reading historical romance novels, watching my favorite movie, pretending to be someone else for a while, laughing about nonsense, wallowing in my loneliness, experiencing my anxiety, unabashedly crying for no reason, eating candy, purposefully showing off my knowledge on a certain subject out of pride, taking a nap in the middle of a day, going to bed too late.
But of course, I do not have the vocabulary or the age to fully understand and fully translate who I am and what I believe in. I don't know what to call myself that does not sound like it is dripping with self-pride and disdain for the ungrateful. I'm riddled with wrong in me, I make conscious mistakes, I have lied, sometimes I am phenomenally greedy. I experience. That's a neutral statement about myself that I can live with. I think I experience. But of course, I'm greedy for more of it.
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