Floor Songs

I have a playlist I call Floor Songs. Anyone who knows me knows what happens when one of these songs comes on. They’ve seen me mid-conversation lose my grip on the reality I was experiencing and lie down where I stood. The world stops, for me at least, as I place myself on the ground as an anchor, and just listen to the music and remember.

I remember the first moment I truly heard the song. Not the first time it was on the radio while I was talking to my friends, or it was playing in the background while I pretended I was going to fold my laundry. The first moment it struck me and took me out of my place and time to let me know I was in a moment.

Each of these songs was not chosen for their beat or lyrics, they were each chosen for the moment they will always bring back to me. I’ll admit they all do tend to be relaxing songs, and most of them have lyrics that resonate with me. Some of them you’d recognize on the first beat and others you may have never heard of. But for me, each of them is a moment in time.

Zen means meditation and for me, meditation is simply the moment you are aware of yourself, fully and completely, the body you are in, the place that you are, and the time you are experiencing. We often talk about meditation in conjunction with mindfulness, they are two sides of the same coin, and yet when we meditate we attempt to empty the mind. But the secret is in the word, mind-full-ness.

When we attempt to empty the mind, an attempt is all we can do as the mind is never empty and refuses to be so, all we do is give it permission to go wandering in its new lighter state, off to places that we have no control of. It’s like taking your dog off the leash at the beach, once they are trained they will stay near but when they are not, and sometimes when they are, they go taking off at high speeds for any sight of smell that spells distraction. And this is not meditation.

To meditate, to create Zen, we need only fill our minds up. When we meditate we do this by returning our mind to our senses. That is why we focus on the breath, feel the light on the back of our eyelids, and feel where our body connects to the earth. When the mind focuses on all the sensory information of actually existing it stays with you in that moment. Weighed down by all the things it forgets to feel or disregards as unimportant when we live our day-to-day lives.

And so this is how my playlist works. It fills me up with the moments I remember. And while I could recite to you every moment my soul relives with each song my goal is only to provide you with some examples so that in this moment you can be filled up with sensory information and feel what I am trying to explain.

The first song I will speak to is A World Alone by Lorde from her album Pure Heroine. I had only recently bought this album when I heard this song. I was standing in my room at university; we’d been having a dorm party, a farewell to the year we had shared, and my last year on campus. The song started to play; the first note seemingly discordant got my attention. I suddenly became aware of the cool condensation on the plastic cup that held my drink as I noticed that my position leaning against my desk was causing the wooden edge to cut into the side of my thigh. I looked around my softly lit room warm with the heat of so many bodies. Several of my dorm mates were sitting on a circle on my rug that had been with me in every room for my four years of university, from my first days of awkward interactions to my cultivated confidence when I strode into any room. The noise of them all talking over each other was a cacophony of joyous laughs and indignant shouts as people denied their truths and avoided dares. And I realized this was a moment. The moment I would leave behind some of my youth and some of my educational exploration as I would soon leave for the incorrectly named real world. All at once I felt completely separate from the world I inhabited and at the same time, I had never been less alone surrounded as I was by friends who knew as I did that this was goodbye to our time here as we marked the end of an era.

The second song I will speak to is Between by Satsang and Nahko from the album Pyramid(s). This song had sat in my playlists for years, a favorite of a friend but never one of mine until I was driving home from Sydney very late one night after a show. I had been on a kind of autopilot for most of the drive, having traversed this particular combination of roads many times. I wasn’t feeling much of anything other than a desire for my day to come to its conclusion and a slight annoyance at a hundred small things that had happened throughout the day but caused me no drama. Until I reached a new stretch, a new path in my regular journey caused by a detour for the sake of road works. I took the first of the new turns where the men at the side of the road were drilling and suddenly a rainbow appeared in the sky, created by artificial light and a broken pipe. My attention was grabbed by the feel of the smooth leather of my steering wheel under my hands and the gentle comforting pressure of my seatbelt against my chest. And I heard the lyrics from my stereo ‘between the love that we seek and the love that’s already there’, and my brain suddenly came to the present. I was driving home, comfortable in my car to my darling dog that despite my absence would welcome me with love and cuddles. I had just been at a show where I had had the chance to do what I love, make people laugh with stories that should have crushed me. And my life which, I had been pondering, looked very bad on paper when compared with the expectation of society, suddenly came to my mind as being full of everything I had ever wanted for myself.

The third song I will speak to is Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken? By Lloyd Cole and The Commotions. I first heard this song in my neighbor’s apartment. I’d known him until this point only as 'the old man who played his music too loud'. Then one night he heard me come home from a bad day of work and I don’t know if it was the squawks of despair or the soft sobbing but something inspired him to invite me over for a drink and so I went. As I entered his cluttered apartment as he told me about every item on his wall, when he got it and why it’s important to him. He told me stories of how he lived his life, the adventures, the tragedy, and the joy. We both shared a love of music and when he realized I’d never heard of one of his favorite bands he insisted I sit down with my glass of cheap red wine and listen to his favorite song. As the needle dropped on the old weathered vinyl and the first crackle of noise came through the stereo, I became aware of the aged unstable chair beneath me and the taste of the bitterly sweet alcohol on my lips. And I saw this man not as my neighbor but as the vital man he was, a man who had lived a long and complicated life before I was a twinkle in my father’s eye. I smelled the stale stench of old tobacco and imagined the many people who had known this man throughout his life, the stories they would tell about him and themselves, the lives they had led. Then I imagined the many people who had known the many people he had known. And all at once, I was aware of the vast stretch of time that existed before me and will resonate long after me. And the length of the universe seemed to soothe my mind as it was lead away from the day that had not been as I wished to the years from now when I could not remember anything I did at work that day but would always remember the kindness of a stranger that turned into a friend.

I could fill a novel with the stories I would tell of each song in my playlist and why it’s there. But my stories are not what is important so instead let me tell you only that each song represents a moment like these ones. When my mind became aware that it was thinking and returned instead to the sensory information of the moment and all that I could feel within myself.

To me, this is my Zen playlist, not because the songs help me empty my mind but because it fills them up. I become filled with the memories of a life that was lived and an experience of a moment in which there was sudden clarity. And so I challenge you to find your own songs. Your Floor Songs. The songs that will take you out of your current situation and into a moment when you had the certainty of knowing you were alive. When you felt the experience of life not just the passing of time. Fill a playlist with these songs and whenever you forget what an incredibly complicated and beautiful world we live in, find the floor, lay yourself against it and let your songs wash over, and remind you.

MY FLOOR SONGS