Releasing the Notes

I love lyrics that have depth. I love a song with a good story. I love the songs that can nest down into your soul and help you feel something.

But every once in a while you just need a feel-good song that makes you smile; something uplifting and positive, something that makes you feel lighter after listening to it.

It may not be something you connect with on a deeper level, or something that captivates your attention, but it is always good for a quick pick-me-up when you need it.

This has been my recent feel-good song:

It just sounds and feels nice after spending time wrestling with deeper thoughts.

I think of it kind of like swimming.

I hate swimming.

But my kids like it, so I end up at the pool a lot more often than I would like. And I can’t just park myself in a lounge chair and enjoy the sun, because I have young kids. So while my older ones are out swimming and loving the water, I am with the younger ones in the water making sure they have a good time.

So while I am trying to make it a happy time, I am overwhelmed by the amount of people, the constant roar or the crowd, people splashing and bumping and being in my space. I am generally already on edge because I am barely able to swim, so I would be no help if something happened, and getting water in my ears or eyes brings me to the verge of a panic attack.

While the pool is such a fun place for so many people, it is not for me. It is too much.

My wife and I have taken steps to make it a better experience for our kids, though. We take them often, we have put them in lessons to make sure they are good swimmers, and we encourage them to enjoy the water as much as they can. The twins often pull me out of my comfort zone to do water slides or other things that they want to do, but need a little encouragement. I hate doing it, but I love the kids, so I do it for them.

Lately, the twins have enjoyed playing “hands up, stands up” in the pool, where they do a handstand and see who can stay under the water the longest. While the fun of the game is to stay under as long as possible, I can’t help but think about how refreshing that first breath of air is as they resurface, gasping and then laughing.

So while, for me, the joy of music is in the depths, it is also fun and refreshing to find a song that is just wholesome, and makes me want to wiggle my butt a little.

I do have to say, though, that while we were in Idaho last week, we went to a private pool, and it was a lot of fun. I was able to enjoy time with the family without all the excess noises and people. I even relaxed on one of those lounge floaties while my two-year-old rode on my stomach and shot people with a squirt gun. It was such a better experience.

I have had the same feeling with the books I have been reading lately. I was really loving the reading, I finished up Slow Productivity, which I wrote about a couple weeks ago, and I read Stolen Innocence about a girl escaping religious and sexual abuse after being forced to get married at 14, and then I read Braiding Sweetgrass, which challenges our relationship with nature, and it was all so good, but so heavy. So I purposely picked up a book about emo music, which is the soundtrack to most of my nostalgia.

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Where Are Your Boys Tonight has highlighted a good amount of my musical heroes from ages past. One of the artists that I have enjoyed reading about the most is Chris Carrabba from Dashboard Confessional. The book talked about how the shows he played as he started out were with loud bands, bands that had agendas about being anti-government and how much life sucks, and then Dashboard Confessional was just Chris and a bassist coming out for an acoustic set about love and heartbreak. At first people were confused and not sure about this guy, but he ended up being a highlight for many of the shows.

When he first signed with a record label, there were two who approached him at the same time and gave him great options. He wasn’t really expecting it, since he didn’t seem to fit in with the scene at all, but his music was such a breath of fresh air to the people at the shows.

When the music they were listening to was always about anger and justice, then to have someone sit down and play songs that connected on a different wavelength was refreshing. They couldn’t get enough of it.

One of my favorite parts of his story is that he was a preschool teacher before he made it big. He also ran some after school programs, and he had some time between the two jobs each day that he filled with playing guitar and singing in a supply closet at work. He went from a supply closet to basement shows to sold out shows where the crowd knew every lyric to every song he sang.

After reading that, I was thinking about what I was doing to be that connection for someone else? How am I helping someone feel seen, helping them get the break from the deepness and heaviness of life.

I did have a friend reach out after reading one of my posts to let me know how refreshing it was to have someone be so honest and vulnerable. Of the people who have reached out to me about my writing, that has been the best compliment I have gotten yet, and it really hit me in the chest.

I haven’t always been this honest and open. In fact, I would say it is a fairly new development. My insecurities often led me to trying to look smarter and more connected than I was. I can’t even count how many chances I missed to learn something new because I didn’t want to look dumb.

I have a friend that is fantastically smart, but talks very monotone and very fast, which is not a great combination. We were sitting with a group of friends once, and he was addressing a third friend as he was sharing something going on in his life. After he finished his sentence there was an awkward pause, and the third friend just shook his head and admitted, “I didn’t catch anything you just said. I was just hoping to figure it out from context as we went along.”

I realized that I have been doing that for most of my life. I don’t want to be the one person in the group who has no idea what is going on, so I would just nod and try and catch what was going on based on context clues.

Then I realized that nobody was benefiting from my doing that. I was only trying to save my ego and make myself look smarter than I was.

Now I am willing to admit that I don’t know things. There are a lot of things I don’t know. And unfortunately, there is a long list of things I had a chance to learn about, but didn’t because of pride. When I own my ignorance, I get the chance to learn and grow from it.

Here are some of the things that happen when I admit that I don’t know something:

• The person I am talking with gets the opportunity to teach me something.
• I get to broaden my understanding of whatever we are talking about.
• When we both know what we are talking about, we can have a real discussion instead of me just nodding along.
• Admitting I don’t know something lets others get to know me better as a person, seeing what kind of things I take the time to learn on my own.

One last lesson I pulled from Chris Carrabba: when all the other voices in my circle are singing loud songs about the unfairness of life, or how bad our world is, or how our government is taking advantage of us, I can still use my voice to share the lessons I have learned from my own experiences. Being the honest version of myself is the best voice I have.

And Chris taught me that maybe there is hope for someone like me, someone who left teaching to pursue something bigger, but is having an interesting time finding where I really fit with the writing community.

Maybe something I write can be a breath of fresh air to someone who needs it.

And maybe they can share the lessons they gathered here with others along their way.

And together, we can all breathe again.