It Was Actually A Constellation of Stars
Yesterday, I mentioned that I read somewhere once that artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was quoted saying that “music is how we decorate time,” and I often think about that when I listen to old songs, and I am taking right back to that moment. But it doesn’t just have to be about the past, though. We can create new memories and associations with music, too…
The hard part about creating new memories is that there’s a good chance that what you are doing is not going to feel like anything significant in real-time. The things you’re putting on playlists today are likely there to serve the purpose of whatever you’re doing right now, and yet, there’s also this possibility that future you might find something worth coming back to from this very moment. But I think it’s okay if you can’t see it that way now. For this moment in time, maybe you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to organize and make sense of it all. Maybe, you can just let yourself be with the music, allowing yourself to take in what’s beautiful, no matter how small it is. That’s all you need to do. Being present right here is more than enough.
And when you do look back on your life, you don’t always have to go Headline-Reading. Of course there’s the big stuff that happened, but then, there are also all of these little bookmarks you placed along the way in books and inside of music playlists that you forgot about. Because even if we thought of our lives using the visuals of timelines, of course, there would be big moments, but the stories of our lives are so much more than big dots on timelines and chapter headings in the books of our histories. There is so much more to our lives, in the details.
And even if you can’t remember all those little details from everything that’s already happened, that’s okay, because you still have today. You can practice collecting small memories right here. And if you don’t capture anything today, you can try again tomorrow. And in the meantime, just by existing at all in this very moment is more than enough…And then, whenever you’re ready, you can keep creating little dots on the journey and placing bookmarks in books that you may or may not come back to. You can do this in the smallest ways. What matters is that you know you are free to make little marks along the journey.
Don’t worry about making a mark. Instead, make millions of little marks. Recognize that you’ll probably forget about some of them—or a lot of them, even. And that’s okay. Make lots of little dots on the map and don’t worry about how it all fits together right now. What matters is that you know you are free to surround yourselves with little reminders that sing: “there is more to you.” And you are free to sow and water seeds in the world that sing that message, too.
This is personal for me. For whatever reason, my brain collects more information than I want it to and it gets tangled very quickly. It can be great for making art, but not so great when you need to pay a bill or remember to respond to a text from a month ago. I’ve had to learn to accept the fact that I’m probably always going to be the one placing millions of little pins in things and forgetting how each piece connects. But it doesn’t mean that I am fragmented as a human being. There is a sense of wholeness here that is taking a lifetime to unpack…and this can be frustrating for my hyperactive, impatient mind, and…it’s also okay. I’ll keep placing little bookmarks along the way, anyway. I will also probably keep trying to see how it all connects in real-time, but maybe I will not be able to figure it all out and maybe that’s fine —because maybe one day, I will look back and find that what once felt like an endless sea of random pins loosely floating above my head was actually a constellation of stars.