I have not sung in the shower in years until this morning. And man! Was I good! I was smokin’ hot*, belting out the hits. Maybe you’re familiar with some of them?
ψ ψ Warning: These are all audio links and the videos may start automatically. You’ve been warned!
Am I Blue? – Ethel Waters (1929) – YouTube – Start at around the 1:20 mark – no embeddable link allowed 🙁
Beautiful Dreamer – Bing Crosby (1950) – YouTube – my version is in a slightly higher register 😉
Separate Lives – Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin (1985) – YouTube
All I Wanna Do – Heart (1990) – YouTube – Rocked the first verse only, but what a song!
Looking at my on-the-fly song list, it becomes blatantly obvious that my taste in music knows no time/genre/artist limits. If there’s a song, and it speaks to me, that’s all that I need.
But the real point is that alone, in the shower, with only my three-year-old to hear, I felt free to let this random collection of songs out, free to let my voice soar, twang, crack and be heard. I felt my spirit open up just a little bit more than it was before and I could feel the happiness filling up the places that mundane once was. Singing to my kids, making up songs about anything and everything, replacing words with their names or favourite toys is fun, and I love doing it, but singing, to express and release emotion, to create a feeling of happiness within, well, I have missed that very much.
I am so grateful for the musical education provided to me by my parents, not only thru endless music lessons but also always filling my world with fabulous music they each loved (there was a lot of diversity in that alone!) and enduring music that I loved (and yes, they suffered through HOURS of Olivia Newton-John, because to me, in my early years, she was musical perfection to my awestruck ears).
Life gets busy and dishes and everyday things that have to get done take over. But I’m learning that it is equally important to nurture those things in our lives that bring us joy. Ain’t nobody ever died from leaving the dishes to sit for a day or two, but I do believe that people have died from having lost all of the passion and fire in their lives.
Whatever it is that brings YOU joy, makes you feel more alive, more capable, more powerful and useful – do it. Unless what does it for you involves jumping off the roof while wearing a bath towel as a cape. Don’t do that.
*smokin’ hot – all things being relative, that is. Clearly I was not transformed into a sultry Billie Holiday, or a rockin’ Janis Joplin, or even the ugly step-child of Ann or Nancy Wilson, but none of that matters, because the only audience I had this morning is still far too young to realize any of that yet. 😉