We’d just finished the mix of a new song. Sitting between the speakers, listening to the crescendo at the song’s end, the drums and bass, the chiming guitars, the newly added background vocals, I became unexpectedly emotional. I’m not entirely sure what came over me. Perhaps it was because the song itself stemmed from an unusual and unusually emotional experience which began on the trip my wife and I took to Israel last December.

I left the control room and there was Jim in the studio, my old friend, among my best. He was speaking to someone on the phone. When he saw the condition I appeared to be in, he abruptly finished the call. Though we’ve been friends for more than half a century, I must have looked unusual because he immediately asked if something was wrong.

It was hard to speak. I was beginning to tear up and, strangely, laughing too.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Did something happen?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Wonderment,” I said. “The wonder of things. I’m not sad. Not at all. I’m feeling everything.”

For the moment the boundary between me and the world, between memory and imagination, between my past and the possible futures before me, had dissolved. Music is like that. Even one’s own. Especially one’s own, when it derives from a similarly boundary-less place.

Though in dreams I still appear with dark hair and youthful skin, I should add that I am old now. I am sixty-six, and the gifts of this are many. One is that the walls impeding human connection become less fixed. The knowledge that time is indeed fleeting becomes an invitation: to love more, to notice more, to become more present within one’s own experience of life.

My belief is that........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)