I sing in a choir, which has been a second home and additional family to me for over 20 years now. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve felt that making music with 90+ other souls every week has saved me — emotionally, certainly, if not actually physically. There’s an intersection of art and science, beauty and biology, that happens when everyone in a room is moving and breathing as one. I can’t explain it to you if you’ve never experienced it, but it’s magic, and I wish you could know what it feels like.
That’s one of the answers I gave to a subscriber here who asked me in a Note: “What gives you hope, even when it feels distant?” I told him that lots of things give me hope: Little things, like an unexpectedly blue sky or an uncommonly friendly stranger. Singing with my choir. My kids. I didn’t say dogs, but I should have. And I told him that looking to the examples of history is, for me, a hopeful exercise, because it reminds me that there have always been dark times, but that doesn’t mean they last forever.
In a neat intersection of life and art and Substack and singing, we happen right now to be working on a piece called Annelies, by composer James Whitbourn. It’s essentially a musical setting of excerpts from the Diary of Anne Frank, which is exactly as moving and as heartbreaking as you might expect it to be. And it contains this line, which has been running through my head for days:
“As long as this exists, the sunshine and the cloudless sky…how can I be sad?”
…Said a thirteen-year-old child, as she looked at that sunshine and that cloudless sky through the window, because she couldn’t go outside to feel it or breathe it in for fear of her life.
Whew.
So if you’ve got sunshine this weekend, or a cloudless sky, to enjoy…there’s your reason to feel hope, if you need one. And if you’re feeling okay, maybe you can pass along a little hope to others. Subscriber William says he feels hopeful when he witnesses small acts of kindness, or sees people come together to try to make a difference. I think we can all be on a mission of hope this weekend. Go out into the world and perform a small act of kindness if you can, and see how it changes your perspective, too.
Oh. And keep looking at the sky.