Perhaps you are like me.  When emotions begin to move inside based on feelings I cannot seem to shake, songs begin to start playing in my head.  Often times, I will wake up with a song on my heart.  It is exactly what has been taking place for two days now.  The same song.  A song I knew by heart as a seven year old girl, singing and listening to my favorite singer of that decade, Debbie Gibson.  A song I haven’t heard since the mid to late nineties when I saw the CD of my favorite cassette, and purely for nostalgia, HAD to purchase Electric Youth to relive those precious late eighties moments as a little girl.  (sidenote: I am now beginning to wonder how my parents put up with me for my entire life, because I used to think when the door was closed, no one could hear me singing at the top of my lungs…)

Anyway, what song is it that has been playing in my head and somehow brings me to finally write in my dusty blog you ask?   Well, I will tell you.  And when I say it, you will know that the feelings and emotions that have been stirring up inside of me are the messy kind.  The vulnerable kind.  The kind I don’t like talking about or admitting I have at all.  Silence Speaks (a thousand words).  Of course, I don’t plan to discuss what is making this song so relevant in my life at the moment, no; I’ve actually come to my blog today because of what it made me begin to think about on a deeper level.  I was seven-ish years old when I had this cassette.  I knew she was writing about romantic relationships.  I knew what she was singing about even though I barely new how to tie my own shoes.  Interesting, right?  I believe as we become older, we forget how smart and perceptive we actually were as children; somehow believing adulthood has made us much more “sophisticated” and “wise.”  (I’m suddenly reminded of why Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to children Matthew 19:14).    I felt the realness of the song lyrics even at that young age, and I began to wonder about something else I had heard.

Recently, “studies show” reading literary fiction can improve a person’s empathy or social skills.  Now, as a grad student currently undergoing a class in understanding research (something I have a love/hate relationship with at the moment); I decided to go online and look up this information in a quick google search just to make sure I heard it correctly.  For the paraphrased article, go here: Reading improves Empathy!?  And for the actual research abstract and full text, go here: Theory of Mind.

Anyhow, it made me start to wonder if music and poetry can do the same thing.  I am sure there is some research out there on it as well, or perhaps someone else is taking that on now, but through my unscientific personal experience, I am going to say it certainly does.  And Debbie/Deborah Gibson, you were so very right in “saying not much is saying a lot.”

There is a reason this song is speaking to me over twenty years later.  Music taught me so much.  It is real, evoking emotion even from the youngest of listeners.  It makes me really concerned about the generations growing up in the last decade and today with some of the garbage on the popular radio.  (Not judging, but seriously ask yourself, if you spoke some of the words of songs you are listening to right now, would you be ashamed to say that in front of your God, your children, a person you care deeply about?  And if so, why do we find it permissable to play this stuff or listen to this stuff by choice when music has a way of imprinting on our hearts and minds? And what is it saying about the motives behind people in the industry putting some of this stuff out there for everyone?)

Words have meaning.  Silence has meaning.  If you think the youth of today don’t understand the messages of the songs today, or that those messages, whether male or female alike, don’t have any bearing on how we are actively living out our relationships with other people, then I think we are believing a lie that has consequences we are already experiencing in what Dr. Brene Brown calls the “most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in US history” in her qualititative research on vulnerability.  I’ve added that to my blog today, because I’m working on this vulnerability thing myself…and failing miserably…which I think is a good thing? While this blog may be bouncing all over the place…it’s been rather cathartic and made me appreciate the beauty of a well written song that has been playing in my head describing my own emotions in a way that I can process.  Perhaps I’ll clean this blog up later to have it make more sense…or perhaps I’ll just leave it messy…