the music between my ears
This topic is a bit off-piste but can we talk about the power of music?
We all know that music can hype you up for a big day, take you back to your first ever high school dance or help you cry it out in bad times. But the biggest power of music is its ability to heal. Or make you whole in ways you didn't know you needed.
I have always loved dance/house/trance music but somewhere between having kids and a busy work life I stopped discovering new music. My Spotify playlist was inundated with different versions of brown/pink noise and Baby Shark.
The Windy City
Fast forward a few years, I started discovering new music in an unexpected place, my Peloton bike. And before you complain saying there she goes on about Peloton again, let me connect the dots for you. I came across Rufus du Sol during a strange period in my life. When I moved to Chicago in 2022, the world was trudging out of a global pandemic, I was going through the motions of postpartum and unwillingly in between jobs. I wasn’t in the right head space. Although we welcomed a change from London, moving from rainy-grey-skies to the Windy City, was far from ideal.
The first Chicago winter was lonely. There were weeks when I wouldn’t make meaningful conversations with any adult other than my husband. And although I love him, I need other humans in my life. Some people are okay with being by themselves, without necessarily feeling lonely. However, before Chicago, I had never been okay being by myself.
Treading the line between being alone and loneliness
Whether or not we are happy being alone depends a lot on if we are at ease with ourselves. Let me explain what I mean. We are all familiar with the deafening silence we feel when a room full of people suddenly goes quiet, sometimes mid-conversation. And someone will always say things to fill in the gap. But when we are with a good friend, the same silence doesn’t feel awkward, and it can almost feel peaceful.
It’s the same when we are by ourselves. If we feel unsettled in our heads, the time we spend alone sends us down deep dark thoughts. We try to silence these thoughts by immediately getting busy, scrolling social media or letting the company of others drown them out.
Being able to stay still and alone with our own thoughts is a gift. It takes practice. Spending a few minutes each day being distraction-free helps increase our focus because we unravel what’s going on in our heads. Chicago forced me to do my time by myself.
THE POWER OF ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC
Spending time alone in deep Chicago winter, I increasingly started using the Peloton indoors and discovered music through classes. I especially loved their EDM classes and fell in love with so many artists such as Rufus Du Sol, Fred Again and Odesza just to name a few.
Rufus Du Sol was one of the bands I spent a lot of time alone with. I used to play their music on my early morning drives to work, on Friday evenings where I just needed a friend to have a drink with, or on a run around Lake Michigan to clear my head. Until Chicago, I used to hate being alone. But in Chicago, listening to their music, I learnt to enjoy my own company. And dance alone.
A few weeks ago, I went to their concert in London, where I remembered all the times when their music healed me. If I closed my eyes I was taken back to my walks along Lake Michigan, staring into its vastness. At first, its vastness used to fill me with emptiness. However, once we felt at home in Chicago, it reminded me how expansive our lives had become by moving to and discovering a new continent. It made me feel much stronger as we had grown as individuals, as a family and professionally.
Rufus du Sol was a concert I would have happily gone alone to. But now that we are back in London, I could share it with one of my closest friends who I met accidentally early on in my motherhood journey – but that’s a story for another time.
