Connecting to others

I popped up to see Eldest's choir concert at college on Sunday, following Snuggler's opening performance in Anne of Green Gables on Saturday (she was Marilla; Little Guy has a small part).On the bus I read The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept with Her iPhone)Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale. Good read, funny writer, worth getting.

The concert was good. As my mind effortlessly wafted between the music (Haydn's Creation) and other worthwhile (and not worthwhile) thoughts, it occurred to me that the anti-gravity thing that happens in with my brain during a live concert doesn't occur with recorded music. And I wondered why that might be.

Part of it is that seeing the source of the music -- the seventy singers and forty orchestra members, the three soloists, the conductor -- makes a difference. Maybe not the difference between eating a McChicken sandwich (if one does that sort of thing) and raising/killing/plucking/cooking a chicken oneself, but sight + hearing means we're engaged with real people, not just their output. We see the joy on the faces of the singers, and we wonder about this one's blue hair or that one's glasses, and somewhere in our being we are aware that those other beings are like us and different than us and are doing something for us.

Then there's the matter of being in an audience. A concert is a different thing than "me and my playlist" or "me and the people who act and think like me" (a fact driven home by the wondrous rapture of the man sitting next to you or the teen texting in front of you). There's an "us"-ness that we lose when we live in the isolation of our preferences.  And maybe that's something we want to lose from time to time, but I daresay, in light of reading The Winter of Our Disconnect, that often when we connect almost-exclusively to our desires we inadvertently disconnect from other things we deep-down need. Like... each other.