Earworms and Being Present
Music is glorious and singing in choir or otherwise being able to be an amateur musician is a great privilege. Also, struggling with earworms - what can I learn from it?
If you adore music and either listen to a lot of it or spend significant time as an amateur or professional musician rehearsing, or probably both, as we tend to do, you may experience one of the downsides of music: earworms.
You know that piece of music you have been working on, and theoretically no longer need because you already sang or played it, but cannot get out of your head?
For me for the last few days it has been the anthem from Epiphany Sunday, From the Rising of the Sun.
There have been nights I have been so tormented by hearing a song over and over in my head that I have Googled “how to get rid of earworms”. It seems that the most reliable “cures” are the passage of time and replacing it with another song by listening to something else and getting it in your head.
In other words, difficult to “fix”.
I have been seeking to turn away from my tendency to want to fix things though. A more constructive approach I am trying instead is spending time with the thing that is troubling me to understand something of what it may be wanting to teach me.
Why do I get stuck in the past?
An earworm of a song that one was working on but has moved on from is, I think, a good example of remaining enmired in something that is not part of the present, the only time one can truly inhabit, but from which both past and future keep pulling away.
Perhaps one of the things that keeps me stuck in the past is, again, trying to fix or improve something that is completed. By continuing to ‘rehearse’ in my head a song I have already sung, I could be somehow trying to improve how I did. An impossible task, I understand that intellectually, but it doesn’t stop the programs that run my internal dialogue from the futile attempt.
I similarly will remember with chagrin something I did days, weeks, months or even years ago and be frustrated with and embarrassed by it all over again, often muttering to myself aloud over it.
Letting go: The Practice
Letting go can be difficult, even though the rehearsing of past imperfections is just another way of participating in unnecessary suffering. It is a well-honed habit of the mind that takes much practice to overcome.
Part of letting go is embracing, in my earworm example replacing the old song with something new, in life in general, being more fully present to this moment here and now rather than clinging to past hurtful or even pleasant memories.
The past is gone.
The things the mind wants to worry over that have not yet happened have not arrived yet, and many of them never will, in this reality anyway.
This is the practice. Over and over again, as often as needed, I let go of either past regrets or future anxieties in favour of being present to this moment, here, now, with the people in my life here and now, with God ever Present in my life here and now.
Presence, again!
It’s funny. We talk of losing ourselves in a moment that is so powerful, whether it is a mind-blowingly gorgeous sunset, or a passionate kiss with the beloved, or listening to a piece of music that is all-encompassing, or in the middle of a choral performance singing some great work like the Brahms Requiem.
But it is in those moments that we could not be more present to what is occurring in the Now. Far from being lost, we are found, we are exactly where we need to be and doing what we need to do, without reference either to the disappeared past or not yet existing future.
So it looks like the answer to my earworm problem, really, is the answer to nearly every other “problem” I have encountered recently.
It’s about being more fully present.