Music Has Always Reached Me...

I love music.  Truly.  From my earliest days I could be found singing all around the house.  In fact, my mom (and later my husband) had to enact a "no singing when you wake up" rule in our home.  It was just too hard for these non-morning people to wake up to cheerful, happy singing. So I complied to preserve the peace in our home...but I still sang in my head!

I discovered early on that I learned lyrics easily and remembered them well.  Eventually, someone taught me how to sing...thank you, Judy (Woods) Hooks!  And then I learned that I was an alto and figured out how wonderful harmony feels when you get the "money" note in a chord.  Oh!  Not much tops that in life, my friends!

Music has always reached me.  Always.  It's the language of my heart.  It speaks to me and teaches me in ways that little else does.  And lately, it's been my "go to" for this journey, particularly on the tough days.  The messages that I get from the music I love have been a big part of how I'm choosing to reshape my life.

Today, one of the people I follow and enjoy on Twitter used a quote from a Switchfoot song, "This is Your Life", as his post.  Here's what the chorus of that song says in part...

"This is your life, are you who you want to be?
This is your life, is it everything you dreamed that it would be?
When the world was younger and you had everything to lose..."

Well, needless to say, songs that pose questions, even rhetorical ones, command my attention and engage my thought as I ponder the answer.  This IS my life...am I really who I want to be?  And if not, why?

I've said to a few people lately that I feel like I'm living someone else's life these days.  And I just want to have my own life back.  Well, that feeling may be understandable given the enormity of the changes I've endured in the past 6 weeks.  But in reality, this IS my life...the result of choices I have made, both on my own and in response to the choices of others.  And if it's not what I want it to be...if I'm not who I want to be...then it is up to me to change that.  Before I can make those decisions, though, another question has to be posed and answered. 

Who DO I want to be?

You see, it does me no good to make grand, sweeping changes in my life without having an idea of who I really want to be when all is said and done. 

What do I value?  How does that play out in my life?  In what ways does my life reflect what I truly believe and would be willing to die for? 

The answers to those questions require me to look at myself with complete honesty - to see my strengths, as well as what is lacking in my character.  It's only with that knowledge that I can decide who I really want to be, and make the changes I need to become that person. 

So, this is what I'm doing these days...seeking the answers to these questions...evaluating where I am, where I've been, and figuring out where I want to go from here forward.  And isn't that what a "journey" is really about anyway?