Play it Again
Great singers know that they can move an audience with a ballad. The combination of the words and the soaring music with their seemingly heartfelt delivery can bring tears to the eyes, even when heard years later played as the background in a commercial. The sentiment might be contrived but there is something about the song that still touches. This kind of feeling can transport us back in time to the very moment we originally enjoyed the song with idyllic memories.
Nothing More than Feelings
This instant replay of feelings happens whether the thoughts attached are pleasant or not. It may even seem uncontrollable because we haven’t deliberately thought about that particular song in a long time. It is just another thought attached to a memory stored away on the hard drive in my brain. I can decide whether I want to attempt to remember more about the time and place or wave it back into my brain to stay tucked away. If the thought brought up a good feeling, I can smile wistfully to myself.
Put that Away
Stifled feelings are the ones I worry about more. When they return, we may not have wished them back either and to get rid of them as quickly as possible, they need to be smothered. We want to remove them. Sometimes, we want to unfeel them altogether. Underfeeling can lead to a general discouragement of thoughts. These memories might be wrapped in disappointment or a belief that they represent failure. They aren’t the sunny memories that we put in the albums to show our friends. But we should still keep them out for a little rethinking. If we can translate to our brains a different thought about them and what they represent, they can still help us. They were the little steps that led us to where we are. They are parts of life.
Graceful acceptance
Acknowledging your own importance does not make your head swell. Bragging does show some ego but everyone sees the fun associated with it. It is not clear to us what remembering challenging times can provide until we see later how it showed us what success looked like. To understand each feeling, we must know its opposite. We know the joy of happiness because we have been sad. We get to feel satisfied by being unsatisfied. We know hunger, anger and envy due to our exposure to their friendlier contradictions. We don’t want to feel them again but they are useful in the long run. When we can accept all the feelings, we can understand why those ballads come back to us. They start out in one place and slowly take us to a beautiful new message through song. Without them, that commercial wouldn’t even have caught our attention.
Is there an old song that brings back memories every time you hear it? Can you stop and identify the feelings you want to stifle most often? Is it possible to understand happiness without experiencing sadness?
