After School Unwind Session: The Deep Tracks

*ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 17, 2020*

Have you ever started a hobby or anything to do in your spare time and enjoy it so much that it makes you wonder, “Why did I wait so long to try this out?” That is exactly how I’m feeling with blogging. I always enjoyed writing, but I usually wrote a lot of poetry. Then of course when I slowly stopped writing, I had the old, overused excuse “I’m too busy…life is getting in the way.” But I had a couple friends within the last few months mention to me and say “Mel, you should be blogging or vlogging!” I thought, yea, sure…someday maybe I’ll give it a try. But only recently did I finally decide to dive in head first. Mentally, I don’t think I was quite ready to begin my blogging journey months ago. I believe I had to wait until something hit me hard enough to make me passionate about writing. And obviously now, I’m ready.

Now Spinning: Muddy Waters – I’m Ready

• Save

🎵 “I’m ready, ready as anybody can beNow I’m ready for you, I hope you’re ready for me.”🎵 – Muddy Waters

Man, do I love listening to the blues. It puts me in a special kind of mood. I can’t even begin to try to think of the word to describe this mood. Creative? Deep? When I listen to Muddy, I FEEL it. It’s in my chest, then goes through my veins. I have to close my eyes and either sway or rock forward and back to the beat. This might sound insane, but I would LOVE to have a scan of my brain and body to see what happens when different types of music is played and compare them to each other as well as when no music is being played for me. I’m sure chemicals are being released from the brain…I would just love to know more about the physical affects of music on the body. So, if there are any doctors or music therapists out there who would be interested in this case study…I’m your girl!

Passion

Ok, so as I’m listening and writing, I’m thinking about having passions and how they drive us. I believe you need to be passionate about something in order to do it right. I’m noticing every day after work I have the desire to blog. It’s never forced and I will never try to force it. But, does that mean that as long as we are passionate about something, we will always succeed? Well, I’m not so sure…

As you already know from reading my blogs, I’m extremely passionate about music. One of the things that I’ve always wanted to do was learn to play an instrument. Preferably guitar and piano. And yet here I am, 39 years old, and I haven’t learned either. So why is that? If I’m so passionate, why haven’t I learned yet?

To me, there is much more involved than just passion. You need the drive, the dedication, and the discipline. I can easily say that I’m passionate to learn music and I have the drive to learn it. However, I never dedicated any time faithfully to learn it or disciplined myself enough to stay on a routine to teach myself.

Did you see what I did just there?

I actually dug down deep and got real with myself. I mean, why lie to myself? It won’t get me anywhere. I did a little self-evaluation to figure out what my problem is. So maybe that is the first step that we all need to take with not just figuring out why we never picked up a hobby that sparked interest within us, but with EVERYTHING that we do.

WHY?!

Three letters. One syllable. For such a small word, it truly is huge! Since wondering why I  haven’t learned to play an instrument yet, I’m now asking myself more questions, diving in even deeper…

• Why do I love music so much?
• Why do I even want to learn?
• Why am I not dedicating time to learn?

Wow. That got pretty deep pretty fast. You see what blues music does to me?!
So now that we dug a little bit into our passions together, did I spark anything in you? Are you asking yourself some questions about your own passions? This “Unwind Session” was just the tip of the iceberg for me. So the important thing for all of us now is to do SOMETHING with everything we gained from looking deeply within ourselves. For me, who knows what that “something” will look like. Maybe I should look into actual guitar lessons from someone since I do not have the self-discipline to do it on my own. All I know is that if you don’t attempt to explore your passions, you will never know what you are missing out on.