20190126.0430

Something I have been trying to do in the past weeks is listen to more music of greater variety. I have a selection of albums that I drive with, to be sure, and with which Ms. 8 is greatly enamored, so I listen to them quite a bit. (I had already done so, as well; I've had the albums since my undergraduate days, for the most part, and I am a creature of habit.) But when I am at my desk, whichever desk it is, I try to keep music playing, and I try to keep the selections different from what I've done before. That is, I try to find more things to listen to, and I try to explore what all is available--and I am finding that there is quite a bit more of it than I had before understood.
It makes sense that there is such a "more," of course. Again, I'm a creature of habit, tending to run again and again on the same paths I have trod many times before, and as I sink further and further into them, my vision is more and more occluded. I see less and less until and unless I make an effort to see more--or hear more, as the case may be. Too, it has been many years since I was a music major, and it was as such that I had the most exposure to other music than that I grew up hearing (which was a larger set than many, between my being a bandsman and growing up amid a family of musicians). I was not expected to have a handle on a great many things outside my professed field of study, and I did not. I still do not, honestly, but I am working to change that.
But it is strange that, even as a music major, and even as a member of a family that has produced music teachers and performers who are still making their living by gigging, I was not more aware of things than I was. I should have been more attentive to groups and genres than I was, an inattention I am only slowly addressing as I sit at my desk and write. The music and its varieties help me to get words out onto the page, whether physical or pixelated, and I am glad of it; I have also to wonder if I might not have done better had I had better access to or understanding of such things earlier in my life. I can hardly change things now, of course, but I am prone to such wonderings, fruitless as they are.
In any event, I am working to redress the issue now--even as I write this--and I am benefiting from it. How I can do so with other media than music, I have some idea--at least in part. Finding the time to do it is always an issue, though, as I work here and elsewhere to try to address many concerns.