We might as well admit that we, too, have guilty pleasures. And, occasionally, we may even extract some surprising wisdom from them. Ah, Gossip Girl, the wise!
We have been doing some reading these past couple of months, and the unintentional common theme among the otherwise unrelated books seems to be happiness and the perception of emotion. Stumbling on Happiness and This Is Your Brain on Music have changed my life. From the conversation on how we fail to make the right choices in order to be happy to the treatment of music as an obsession, I find our existence, and especially that of the artist, fascinating. I will not bore you with my lousy synopsis of these fantastic books, but rather I will say that, again, I am inspired to create, to perform, regardless of financial retribution or even whether an audience is large or small. And I find that, indeed, our need to perform is somewhat of an obsession, and the pursuit of emotion, good, bad, pleasurable or painful, is inevitable, because it is said emotion that fuels our muse, our desire, our drive. Precisely, as Gossip Girl says, for us "with great emotion comes great power," the power of expression.
Today was a tough day at my day job. The company I work for had to face its critical staff and make amends for wrong turns made in the recent past. The room was filled, if not yet with hope, with passion. And it was inspiring and moving in itself, to see so much emotion, to share with those who we musicians call "normal people" that moment of intense feeling--no matter what that feeling was. For a moment, it made us all more alive, more ready. It was a taste of shared power.
So I leave you here with a video/ad that I'm sure many of you have seen, but it never gets old. And I tell you: go, feel, act.
Laura
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
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