Yesterday, we were lucky enough to enjoy a piano and violin concert put on by two wonderfully talented young musicians.
It was wonderful. Moving. But more than that, it was a relief.
For that brief window of 60 minutes, there was nowhere to be, nowhere to go, nothing to solve, nothing to improve, and nothing to analyse. We were not trying to work anything out. We were not asking what it meant, not looking for the psychological explanation behind it.
We were simply there. Listening. Letting the experience of the music unfold, wordlessly, without meaning or reason.
This is one of the things art gives us. Not an answer, but an experience. Not another explanation, opinion or idea but a way back into life.
So many people we work with seem very caught up in the question “why?”
Why am I like this?
Why did this happen?
Why do I feel this way?
Why do I keep doing the same things?
Why can’t I just be different?
These questions are understandable, but they are far less useful than we realise. Sometimes “why?” becomes another way of standing outside life, observing it, dissecting it, circling it endlessly, without ever quite entering it fully.
No one sits in a concert hall listening to someone play the piano and thinks, “Yes, but why are they playing?”
They simply listen to the music and something happens. And there is no point to it.
There is something profoundly important in that. A life is not something to be understood but to be heard, felt, played, risked, entered, and lived.
There is something funny here, though: what allows us to get the most out of a concert is not so different from what allows us to get the most out of therapy.
You can sit in a room while beautiful music is being played and miss the whole thing. You can be there physically while your mind is somewhere else entirely. Planning tomorrow. Worrying about what someone meant. Thinking about what you need to do next. Trying to work out whether you are enjoying it properly.
You can do the same in therapy.
You can arrive with an agenda so tight that nothing unexpected can get in. You can be so busy trying to understand yourself that you never actually experience yourself.
And then therapy becomes another performance. Another analysis. Another attempt to manage yourself from a distance.
The real work asks something different of us.
Openness. Curiosity. A willingness to be with what is happening, as it is happening. The actual living experience unfolding in the room.
That is where music happens.
That is where therapy happens too.
Art, and music in particular, can remind us of this.
We did not have this concert booked for months. In fact, we woke up yesterday with a wonderfully free day ahead of us, and after ten minutes of searching, we found it. It cost next to nothing. It got us out of the house, into the local community, and into a room with other people who had also chosen, for an hour, to simply be there and listen.
That matters.
Not everything worthwhile has to be productive. Not everything beautiful has to be useful. Not every experience has to become self-improvement or pre-planned.
Sometimes the music is enough. So go, find a concert, and let the music do its thing!
