Master Minds

I’ve recently been observing how all of our senses can help us remember the past. 

Examples of sensory time travel:

-  Every blackberry that lands on your tongue reminds you of climbing the rock wall at age 7 with your homeschooled neighbors and picking all the berries for pancakes the next morning.

-  No Doubt’s “Just A Girl” brings you back to the Tweeter Center lawn where you watched your first concert with your parents at age 9. Gwen Stefani shouted “I’m just a motherfucking girl” on the last chorus & your mom told you never to repeat it again. Couldn’t help it.

-  The smell of fresh cut grass makes you think of your first job mowing lawns at 14, listening to Incubus & Lauren Hill on your CD player everyday, and finding 23 four-leaf clovers during summer break.

-  Feeling the texture of a sleeping bag reminds you of the time you were 21 and you took all your best friends to a monastery on the hillside to watch the meteor shower, eat peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, and discuss life.

-  Every time you see autumn leaves, you remember back to school shopping, picking out the perfect pumpkin, making apple pie, and watching the incredible cult-classic film “Halloween Tree” that only exists on VHS. No exact age, it’s (still) an annual occurrence. 

Five primary senses- sight, sound, taste, smell, and feel. I think two other useful things for memory are creation and observation. My best example for both of these is the process of writing your thoughts down (in a journal or on walls or through a blog). Yes, you are “feeling" the pencil/spraycan/keyboard, but it's your physical action of documenting your ideas that creates something unique. Observation is then the mental action that comes into play when you reread it. Yes, you’re “seeing” the words, but your brain is pulling them together and repainting the memory.

The Vitruvian Man (1487)- Leonardo da Vinci

Our minds are powerful tools- they can bridge hearing to listening, seeing to understanding, thinking to feeling. I’ve finally figured out what countless philosophers have been trying to say. The mind can be trained, just like the outer physical body. With the right amount of exercise and care, your mind will feel more like a gift than a weapon. Clarity, motivation, confidence, productivity, kindness, peace > confusion, lethargy, fear, anxiety, cruelty, indifference. Want a better life? All you have to do is start. Trust me, there's not a more perfect time than right now. 

Infinitely yours,

KSB

Songs not Seconds

Pick three songs that you feel most describe your life.
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Not ones you like just because of the sound, but because of its essence. Songs that you can understand multiple layers of, possibly down to the rough draft. Songs that seem to understand you, probably more than any of your exes did. Songs that make you feel something, rather than just hear something. 
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Well this is one of those songs for me.
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Gnarls Barkley is a musical superteam made up of hiphop star Ceelo Green & DJ/producer Danger Mouse. This musical bromance has been on my radar since senior year of high school, when "Crazy" came out and brought some funky bass beats to the radio. Their first album, St. Elsewhere, was an avantgarde gem and changed the way I experienced music. 
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Then "Going On" arrived from their sophomore album, The Odd Couple. I love everything about it- the architecture of sounds, the cool video, and most of all the lyrics. It's one of my favorite running songs, pre-game anthems, & everyday tracks (I've listened to it well over 1000 times). If I had to choose a song to best describe my life, this would be crowned the winner. 
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So, my inquiring mind wants to know... what's your song?

Train Track Mixtapes

I’ve always wanted to conduct a social experiment.

I left the country for the first time during Summer 2010, flying solo to Krosno, Poland for a 2-week conference. My university sent me as a delegate to solidify an exchange student program with their college, but it wasn’t until I arrived that I realized I was the only American in a group of fifty international residents. It was the first experience I’ve ever had being exposed to several new cultures, languages, and lifestyles in the same place.

Krosno, Poland - Summer 2010

I fell in love that summer. I was captivated by passion for the world and the diversity of individuals within it… and I wanted to learn more. 

Since that summer, I have studied abroad in Spain, lived in Washington DC, and now I’ve somehow ended up in Boston.  I spent most of my high school years soaked with wanderlust and resented Massachusetts for making me feel stuck. But Boston is a whole other ballgame.  It feels nostalgically European, and everything feels real but picturesque at the same time. At least three times a day I stop to wonder if I’m living in a film.

Two years of observations and notes have altered my life brilliantly. But I have nothing tangible, no physical evidence of my mental productivity. AKA I’ve been lackadaisically living in Procrastinationtown. Until now.

I finally brainstormed and blueprinted my first solo project as a ‘real’ adult.

Three of my biggest passions are people, music, and trains. I ride the train/subway in Boston everyday and I’m always observing the people I see while I listen to my favorite music. The fundamental question I kept asking was “how do I make this a more interactive experience?” The obvious answer is conversation. I needed to blend another passion to propel this project forward. But what do we talk about?

A whole chandelier of light bulbs illuminated my mind when I found the answer.

Do you ever see someone nodding their head to a beat in their headphones and feel compelled to know what they’re listening to? Or see someone mouthing lyrics and wonder what song they’re trying to be the star of? As a music fiend and a people-person, I’ve always wanted to know. 

And we’re all about to find out. Every week I will be asking 10-20 people on the train what song they are listening to at that precise moment. Then I’ll be compiling a weekly mixtape of sorts, of all the music that Bostonians are listening to every week. I’ll write down descriptions of the people I talk to, any important conversation notes, and a short description of the track itself.

Saturday morning I put it to the test and talked to 5 people on the green/red line trains. I would say “I’m sorry for interrupting your music, but I’m writing an article on what people in Boston are listening to and I was wondering- what’s playing through your headphones right now?” Then all five of them gleefully responded with the name of the song. Each time they would even show me the screen of their mp3 player, without me asking to see any evidence at all. Four of the conversations were fairly brief, and another one went on for the duration of three songs.

It seems that’s how I’m keeping the time now. My life is being counted in songs, not seconds. I couldn’t be more happy. 

This week I’ll be working on a website and other logistics for the project, so stay tuned and I’ll clue you in on all the progress!

Infinitely yours,

KSB