Listening to the Radio: A New Year's Resolution

If I were to make any resolution for the New Year, and these are seldom, I would listen for the year as I listen to a newly discovered song.

Just the other day I was driving along the 5 freeway; on my left, the sun guiding the Pacific, and on my right, Oceanside’s famous stretch of mustard fields. These are just the kinds of drives that lull me into a meditative trance, that dispel the doggedly anxious thoughts from my mind and allow me the simple pleasure of being in the world. There is nothing else to do in the car but drive, and while this made me crazy with boredom as a child, it has since become a favored form of contemplation.

Even my radio listening habits must adapt to these long drives. Because I am crossing multiple county lines, my go-to stations become static, and I am forced to explore the uncharted musical airwaves. And because I hold no expectations for what I will discover there, my reception of the unknown changes. I wait with curiosity for a song to unfold. I wonder about when the song was first popular, what era its stylistic motifs recall, what mood, season and scent the song holds for people I will never meet? Who picked up the guitar because of it? Is it a wedding ballad or a break-up bandage? And so, like the Border Patrol check point I am sure to pass along the highway, I wave through most of the unknown indiscriminately. Everything about the drive conducts flow. And along it, the radio becomes a teacher of interior openness and agility.

Beyond the contemplation of the historical or musical lineage of the song, I encounter an even more basic appetite for what might be termed auditory surprise. I do not know where the first few chords will lead, what instruments will join by the chorus, or what story the lyrics will tell. And so I remain suspended upon every moment sliding into the next. If I hear a song that really thrills me, I will download it into my itunes collection and without fail, replay the song until I am practically sick of it. Something is lost when the song is possessed in this way. It becomes familiar, known, beloved even. It’s now “our song,” a karaoke favorite that can be belted nostalgically, again and again. But will we ever hear it in the same exquisitely open and vulnerable way we did that first time?

And so it is with friendships and work and neighborhoods cherished for their worn-in comfort. The risk of assuming deep familiarity about any of these things is that we forget to make room for the inexhaustible mystery dwelling within them. To neglect the profound otherness in a person—those parts which we can neither predict nor explain—is to overlook the locus of divine creativity. If I am deadly serious and certain of what it means to be a student, a manager, an activist, or an economist, what room have I to grow into a different understanding of those things?

If I can extend the musical analogy just a bit further into the New Year, I would add that our lives expand according to our willingness to be surprised by them. That doesn’t just mean waiting for something new to happen, but allowing even the familiar to be rendered unexpected. To anticipate the course for this year, based upon the last, is to short-circuited its potential. That is one boring drive. One small life. And I would much prefer to stay with the waking of this year as if it were a new song, breaking through the static of old certainties.