Five-Minute Friday...SONG

There's nothing like a song to conjure up a happy memory.  Mothers dig out old songs to sing to babies, and lovers have "our song."  And how about a school song to resurrect the past.

Unlike the eye, which is always looking for something new and exciting and different, the ear likes to hear the same thing over and over and over.  It is always on the alert for a soothing oldie.  Song is comfort food for the spirit.                                          
                                                            

As a mom, one of my favorite memories of raising kids is Sunday-night singing.  We used to have singing friends and every Sunday night we would get together at someone's  house to sing.  We sang old songs and we learned new songs, which are now some of the old favorites we love.  I miss Sunday night singing.

Is there anyone who never got a song stuck in their head?  I can never figure out why, but sometimes a song takes up residence in my head and sticks around for DAYS.  I'm always a little afraid to think too much about that, lest I might summon a recent one back to haunt me.  Even as I write this I'm trying to avoid eye-contact, so to speak, in an effort to keep them at bay.  So, moving along...

Singing runs the gamut.  On the one hand, anybody can do it.  Anybody.  As long as you don't delve into its mysteries too deeply.  Once you start to analyze song, it's really quite complicated.  There's the pitch and the tone and the tempo, the key signature, the style.  All sorts of things, really.  But then that is another beauty of song:  Truly something for everyone.

Five-Minute Friday...COMFORT

Comfort kinda gets a bad rap.  In our modern society, we want to think comfort is for wimps and sissies.  Who needs comfort when we can have adventure?  Why tie yourself up (or down) with comfortable old friends and family when you could be out making new friends?  Comfort is almost viewed as something primitive, something we are too sophisticated to need or want.  But.... When you peel off the facade, it's what we want. 

Comfort is our default.  We start looking for it the instant we make our way to the world.  First it's from our mother.  So far so good.  But after awhile she hands us off to some else, or sets us down, and that's the beginning of enlarging our comfort zone.  Pretty soon it's full of other people and lots of places, but still our own little corner of the world, and we start to like it.

But nooooooo, that's not good enough.  Before long, we get badgered into stretching our comfort zone just a l-i-t-t-l-e bit more.  It's scary out there!  It's lonely out there!  But if we take one step at a time, we can expand our comfort zone gradually, and we can even like it.

Some of us go a long way.  We leave our family, we leave our friends, we leave town, we even leave the country.  And it's all exciting and adventurous.  But I've been around awhile, and I have observed that at some point in our lives, if we live long enough, almost all of us start looking for comfort again.  Sometimes we get a warning that our time is about up, and whaddya know, that's when we want to go back to our memories of when things were good, and we were . . . yes . . . comfortable.

Hmmm.... maybe comfort is more than it's cracked up to be...