Let Barry Manilow Help Fix Us!!!

I’ve known since early in my recovery, now 27 years strong, that music could gift us beautiful gems to carry in our recovery basket. In the first weeks and months after being hurt, I utilized music and singing to help my halting, bump-along speech and processing speeds with what I consider marked success.

I just read an article about how, over the years, studies great and small-but-promising have continued to reveal hopeful insight into how music helps our cognitive and overall health.

It has long been my personal visual that our brains are filled with empty hallways and closed-off rooms, aching for us to dare down them and fling open rooms of old capability and helpful stores. I have believed, from very early on, that music helps connects those rooms to lighten up more of our cognitive houses.

So I sing. Always have. I don’t sing well anymore but I sing anyway. I am older than many of you so I sing old ABBA and Bob Seger and Rolling Stones and David Bowie. And yes, I belt out old Barry Manilow and John Denver and Beatles and Carpenters and I don’t care when I am lousy or when I am nerdy.

I am fixing and I am healing.

Are you?

The article I read noted several wonderful ways experts now believe music can help us. They tout that music helps overall cognitive function. It releases endorphins and we could all use a little feel-good flood. Singing tones facial muscles, diaphragms and intercostal muscles. It has benefitted those struggling with vocal and swallowing control. It aids lung capacity, it helps memory and may boost immunity.

SING!

It’s easy and fun and it doesn’t cost a thing. It feels good, it benefits us in so many ways, and it may just be helping to fix our brain pathways.

Music is a gift to the soul. The exhausted being of those of us who struggle on all sides of this injury.

There are too many times when I cannot recall the movie I just watched or the score of a football game that just finished. But, doggone it! I sang one of Barry Manilow’s hits from the late 70s today, start to finish, without a flaw.

Laughing at myself.

A favorite thing I love to do is to get lost on YouTube, chasing down rabbit holes of songs from my youth, great duets, brand jingles from the 70s, unforgettable performances I saw once in concert or on tv, perfect harmonies, beautiful hymns, certain show tunes that made me cry.

Music is a gift like wild flowers. Like sunrises and sunsets and autumn colors and starlit nights. It fills us, all for free. It heals and soothes us when we all need healing and soothing.

Sing in the shower. Sing in the car. Sing with your kids, your people, your friends. Sing at church or in a community choir. Dance a little. Clap to the rhythm. Grab two long kitchen utensils and pound the beat on a pillow. Tap your toes. Whistle. Hum. Learn to line dance. Join a polka at a neighborhood festival. Take up an instrument. Find a free summer concert. Go downtown and listen to the sidewalk musicians.

And sing.

Your successful recovery is music to my ears. xo