Was walking in the subway station yesterday (some may say this isn’t the safest place to be right now, but hey…when you gotta get around 😉 & heard a guy playing this song, asking for $.
It was a song that brought back a flood of memories. These were specific memories, to a specific time in my life.
Has this ever happened to you? Does music sometimes elicit an emotion? A memory? A feeling? One that you haven’t had in a while?
Does it ever happen to you when you smell something familiar even though you may not have smelled it for years? A hot dog at a baseball game? Does it happen when you view something – like that pic I shared in “stories” of “Doc & Marty” where you can tell Michael J. Fox has aged w his battle :/ vs what he looked like in Back To The Future or Family Ties?
I believe our brains are like video camera. There’s a lot of research to support this. I believe what we see, what we hear, what we taste, what touch, gets recorded.
For some of us, we have clear access to much of what’s been recorded. For some, finding access to most any memories is difficult. And for most, I believe, there are things we remember sharply/& still things we can’t access. At the end of the day though, aside form a physical injury or a major ailment, I believe what’s been recorded, is something, if we work on STARR type practices, we “make room” for “getting back” in our memory bank.
I’m specifically focused on the music however, bc of the experience in the subway yesterday.
Whenever I go back to my parents house, & they have a fam gathering – they like to go to the piano they have in their house. My dad remembers a few songs. My mom’s always been a singer in choirs. So when they have ppl over, they go back to an old favorite of theirs: “Sunrise, Sunset.” One of the verses is etched in my brain: “Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play? I don’t remember growing older. When did they?”
I tear up every time I hear that song. It makes me sad instead of happy, bc even at a young age, when my brother was sick, & they’d play it, it would make me think of time passing fast, & not having enough of it.
Whether I like it or not, that’s a traumatic thought. It’s something I suppress & haven’t dealt w. It’s tied to a difficult time in my life, which led to feelings of fear & sadness. And…I only get those feelings back, when I hear that song.
Is there a greater example that “The Body Keep Score” and that we play “Emotional Whack-A-Mole” & trauma just gets stored, than how music, upon hearing one note, can bring about a flood of difficult feelings & memories? Music is amazing & gives an awesome high – but like smells, like sights, it can also help us realize what we are holding inside that may not be serving us.
