Musical emotion

I love music, but I also hate it.

I love how listening to a specific song can make us smile or cry or scream as loud as humanly possible. I love the way it makes you happy to sing along to your favorite songs, how it makes a connection between people that otherwise have little in common to talk about. Everyone has an opinion about music, whether you are a rock n roll headbanger or a F Elise fanatic.

But...

I hate the way we automatically asosiate a piece of music to a feeling we have, when we first hear it, or something you are experiencing in your life at that time. Of course, there are some good sides to it. For instance, having a song, you can call "our song."
Like the one you played at your wedding while you slowdanced, all eyes turned on you, hoping and wishing for your happiness to last long.

The road-trip song everyone in the car jams to, the one that gets stuck inside your head for weeks and creates an inside joke for the passengers on that trip.

The song, you share with a best friend, that you have heard together so many times, you know every verse and chord by heart.

Or the one, that reminds you of something, you wish would last longer than it did. Something that you enjoyed while it lastet. Like the song you listened to constantly during the best summer of your life. Or the one that, for whatever reason you can't figure out, just makes you smile like a kid with an ice cream cone.

But we also connect music to the sad parts. However cheerful and upbeat a song might be, our mind can easily turn it into the worst thing you will ever hear.

Like when a boy sends you the lyrics to a powerful and romantic song, and every time you hear it it reminds you of the time he broke your heart.

The one you heard when you were crying over a loved one getting really sick.

Or the one you were introduced to by someone, you will later wish you never had met.

These songs, they haunt us because of the weight we put in them. And we can'thelp it, cause we can't change the way our minds work. The way it can turn beautiful into ugly, comfort into distress. If we could choose the way our mind associates every feeling, every experience, every thought with our senses, we would. We most certainly would. And we can try as hard as we want, but it will always be there.

Sometimes, when you are hurting, you will be told to forget, to "put the past behind you." but how are you supposed to do that if your past is blasting out from the radio every time you turn it on. I believe, that every human being in this never-endingly huge world has had at least one small moment, that will never leave their memory, no matter how hard they try to throw it out. Because that is just not the way it works. The human brain is not some kind of machine you can adjust.

The things, that have an impact on our lives, the ones that shapes us as a person and brings us closer to what matters; those are the things that never leave us. Pleasant as well as dreadful.

Music have a way of reminding us of all these things. Without it, we would be rid of the haunting from painful memories, but we would also be missing out on the nice ones. So, in a way, isn't it worth it?