Sometimes it happens that you feel like you’re surviving and not properly living. You pass through everyday life as if you were watching yourself living and not as actually being the main character of the movie of your life.
Maybe you just stop for a while to watch you’re way of living and find it great: your life is full, your day is quick, a very few spare time and a lot of people around you. Your mobile phone is hot, a lot of calls to do and to listen to. Many tasks to squeeze in a few hours, “always on the run” as Lenny Kravitz says in one of his songs.
This constant run, this lack of time, this apparently full life leave you tired, very tired… and empty. But you still don’t know this. The only thing you can feel at the moment is the tiredness and — at times- the need to isolate yourself from the world. You long for quietness, for lonely evenings with yourself. Once you get to rest and to close the world outside, you feel there’s still something that prevents you from benefitting from it. You feel uneasy and upset.
Sometimes it happens you start asking yourself why: why once you have what you longed for, you still feel uncomfortable? Why once you finally can rest, your brain still works, your sleep is light and your body wakes up more tired than when gone to bed? You go on trying to find an answer to this, without succeeding in it. And you go on surviving.
Sometimes it happens that your body is your “wake up call” and sends you proper signals of what’s happening in the reality you’re escaping or just living marginally. You go to bed exhausted, but you can’t sleep or rest. Your mind goes, runs, works. Your heart starts beating heavily: the clock goes and your eyes are still wide open. You get angry and in worst nights, you come to beat your head as you can’t understand what’s happening though you would like to.
Sometimes it happens that music breaks into your life as a revelation, bringing some of the answers you’ve been trying to find for ages or at least putting you in front of the evidence it’s time to act. It did happen to me with an italian song that suggested me why, notwithstanding I seemed to be fully living, actually I was not. This song and the difficulties in sleeping were my “wake up call”, the beginning of a long and twisted path which has become the root of what I am now. A person who’s still walking but with the strength of a new awareness of herelf, who has learnt how to listen to her body as much as to her music. A person that would rather choose the darkest black or the lightest white, instead of the boring grey.
Originally published at medium.com