Sound Track

Something about a song lyric, popping up in your ear at just the right time and your life can flash by.  Maybe not your entire life, but certainly a few segments.
One of the things that keeps me exercising regularly is the ability to listen to music while doing so.  I move around on Pandora a lot and ultimately settle on a genre.  Usually it's blues music because I know that will keep me awake and to the task at hand.  But occasionally I wonder over to Neil Young or Dylan, or even Jonathan Edwards, a lesser known country rock artist whose sounds often sooth better than a cool drink of water.
Today, a combination of all three took me back to lovers and friends from decades past.  I realized that you never stop loving someone unless you work at it.  There were a couple of times, OK maybe even more than two, when a relationship in my back pages ended and I was feeling undone.  We've all been there but when Dylan sings "If you see her, say hello..." a stone cracks inside me and the beauty and pain and gratitude as well as regret pours out.

As I get older I'm amazed by how often I hold images of people I've known in my mind.  It doesn't matter how many years have transpired since we last saw one another.  True with social media, we have the ability to peer into windows that are open for all.
I've come to believe that we all have a sound track to our lives.  Just as the things we see and experience at certain ages stay with us, the emotions tied to certain pieces of music or places or the artists that accompanied both hold a key to our emotional literacy.  We tend to remember what is held together by strong emotions.  The research supports that, but it doesn't take a study to realize that emotion is thicker than most all else.