Dipping my toes into Deep Thinking.

I am not what you would call an Intellectual.  I have the focus of a two-year-old and age hasn't lengthened it.  I tend to be more of an 'emotional thinker', as I call it.  That means, basically, that when I am for something, I am all-out-whole-hog-get-outta-my-way for it.  I hold certain views very passionately, but most things do not hold my focus long enough for me to sink my teeth into them, so to speak.

So, when something knocks me off my feet and makes me stop in my tracks and want to ponder, I pay attention.  This happened last night when I arrived home to find that my dear friend, Els (in Holland), had sent me a birthday present.  Because of the distance and mailing costs, we are always challenged to find something meaningful but mail-able.  She had sent me music.  Divenire by Ludovico Einaudi.  I popped it into my stereo, and scuttled off to the kitchen to make pie dough.  The music started and I stopped.  I stopped what I was doing and went into the living room and sat down and listened.  And wept.  Because there was something so deeply moving about this music that it seemed to call up a longing from someplace long ago and deep inside.  It wasn't actually sad, it was just....well, it was just an exquisite longing.  And that made me sit and think about music in general, and how sound can reach us the way words cannot.  And then I thought about how amazing it was that she had found this and thought of me.  And then I thought about how much music there is that I will never hear.  Of course, then my polliwog brain started jumping to how many books there are that I will never read, and how many birds I will never see or hear.  I put the brakes on at that point because it was becoming 'unnecessary thinking'.

The point to all of this - if there is one - is that it continually amazes me how deep connections run.  There is music to connect us to that deep well of longing/happiness/sadness; there are good friends who bring us special joy; there is the blogosphere that connects those of us so far apart, yet so much alike.  Sometimes, before it completely overwhelms me and I have to look away, I get this glimpse of how enormous and utterly breathtaking is the reach of life on this planet and in this universe.  This is a deep pool of thought that I will be dipping into often in my quest for a kinder, gentler me.