Many Paths: Music is our universal language

Music as a whole can allow for the mind and body to wander. It creates an alternative universe where it is just you, and the song playing in your ears. Since the beginning of time, we have been making music and listening to it with admiration. We were given a gift that gave us memories, feelings of inexplicable creativity, and joyous times of dancing, laughing, and growing.

As a society, we can understand each other better by our favorite type of music. A very typical ice breaker question is what is your favorite type of music, type of genre, or even your favorite artist.

It can provide clues to if a person is outgoing and adventurous, or reserved and restful. Through our most treasured tunes, we can connect with others, and build a new form of community that shares an appreciation for our dearest form of music. It can strengthen our relationships, construct our character, and while music does not define, it can definitely shape us.

Our universal language is the bonds of music. We cannot all speak the same tongue, but we can understand the emotions a song is telling us. Most of us can understand the story being portrayed to us through the rhythm of the song.

It tells us to cry, or to dance, or to grab a loved one and hold each other until you feel like moving again. When life gives us chaos, just listening to music can provide a glimpse of relief, a moment to rest and let our emotions just be.

Not only is music helping us with our emotional development, but it also plays such a pivotal role in our educational development.

We get to grow and learn more about cultural appreciation through various genres of songs and different styles of music to learn more about the different types of music across the world.

We even increase spatial awareness and pattern recognition through listening to the sounds. Music even teaches us memorization as we continue to listen to the same song until we know every line by heart.

However, it always feels as though you can learn an entire song in a short drive, but never be able to remember a single thing for your next exam.

We learn to dance from an early age through music. Whether we just move to the music, or we learn how to waltz, do the macarena, or a beautiful contemporary piece that leaves the audience in tears.

With the bass that makes you want to just tap your foot or get up and throw your hands and let loose, music will always let you just move in whatever way you feel you should, and music will never judge you.

Music can hold memories. Memories with the happiest of smiles, and memories drenched in sorrow. It can provide a moment of relief for you to reminisce in times shared with your loved ones and remind you why to smile.

It can transform you and take you back in time to when you were just a little kid putting on performances for your families and times with friends and car speakers about to blow.

The melodies remind you of the comfort you felt and the calmness you were wrapped in as the moment continued where all you were worried about was how loud you could sing the next chorus, leaning into the harmonies and feeling the same chills you felt when you listened to your favorite song for the first time, and never wanting to relinquish that feeling.

Music is joy. It is happiness, and beauty, but also sadness, and grief.

It takes you back to the time when you thought the only person in the world who understands you is the verses in the song. The only solace was the artist who could capture your grief within just three and half minutes. It ties you back together from being pulled apart from life.

To know that music is there, always to keep you away from danger, and safe inside your mind is a blessing to everyone who can listen.

It wraps up emotions into a little bundle and gives everyone something they can listen to and just feel.

McKenna Clark is a junior at Williamsfield High School.

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Many Paths: Where would we be without music in our lives?