“Do you know that your soul is composed of harmony?”
– Leonardo da Vinci
Sometimes, all the strategies-exercise, meditation, breathing, journaling, yoga, etc. to create calm and fulfillment just feel like hard work. Just exhausting. The mental gymnastics of mindfulness, reflection and contemplation are draining, rather than filling the well. Trying to find tranquility by bringing the pieces of my life into some kind of complete pie chart feels like a Sisyphean task. In the past these approaches have served me well, but at times I must “soothe the soul directly”.
Sometimes I just need to heed the words of the incomparable Oliver Sacks:
“Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”
And straightforwardly follow the advice of Oliver Wendell Holmes:
“Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.”
