“The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain…Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.”
Oliver Sacks
Music is also capable of suspending fear, pain, and doubt. Your workout playlist can push you the extra mile. Ambient noise can boost your concentration and thus productivity levels.
In short, music can free your mind so you can do anything from dancing with fear to get stuff done.
“Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation,” wrote Sacks. Like laughter, it is intuited — it needs no further explanation.
There’s something instinctive about music that tugs directly at the heart. It needs little if no processing. As the plants tilt toward the sun, so to do the ears.
“Language is used every day, and easily becomes shopworn, and it takes a poet to recall it to its freshness, its ability to embody eudaimonistic insights in a meaningful way. Music is not as shopworn, and thus may cut straight to the heart.”
Who will curate the curators, influence the influencers, or teach the teachers?
Those who marinate the world with their point of view assume their rightness. But the signaler too must too look back in the mirror and reimagine themselves.
The true expert sees reality at arm’s length, merely touching what they know, always learning from others.
Everything we do is a false start
Fragility becomes a strength in the hunt for gathering strings of ideas. Gazing into space, the clusters of stars flash with an impulse that branches forward from moment to moment.
We do best to gut-check each other, with history whispering in our ear.
A shared stimulation keeps the world more interesting and encourages us to make small bets. We need good collective ideas to resume going upward as a whole.
