Better Than Normal

In May I attended a four-day Zoom music class with over 100 musicians from around the country and the world. The musicians reflected a broad range of talent and expertise, from excited beginners to impressive teens to performing musicians whose livelihood had been significantly disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic to amateur enthusiasts like me.

The class focused on general themes around the power of music, its emotional impact and healing effects and utility as a communication vehicle. There was a spiritual component as well, given the musical aspects of religious and cultural traditions. This was the third time I had done this particular class, but this time it was via Zoom, given today’s odd circumstances. Many of the people there were alumni, and as such, there was a community feeling to the class and camaraderie based on having experienced the power and connection of the class and its instructors before.

It was an energized group, happy to be with each other again to share a common interest in how music brings people together. No one cared what religion you practiced, what your ethnicity or country of origin was or what political party you identified with. The common bond was music and how it moved you at an emotional and spiritual level.

It was weird to have the class taught on-line, especially having done it before face to face, and multiple six hour days at the computer was a challenge physically and mentally, even if the sessions were broken up into smaller bites of about two hours a piece. Nonetheless, the people on-line seemed grateful to be interacting directly with other humans, even if electronically, as everyone’s routine and many of the participants’ income streams had been significantly disrupted by the pandemic.

We discussed the power of music to heal at times of crisis. Several of the performers were taking the hiatus as an opportunity to focus on projects they otherwise wouldn’t be able to pursue as thoroughly as they could in isolation. Some were focused on writing and composing. Those with the right home gear were recording, and were recording with others by trading digital files over the Internet. Everyone seemed to have adapted well after several weeks of getting accustomed to being hunkered down.

We talked about when we might be returning to a life resembling that before COVID. It quickly became clear the group wanted a life with profound changes and not the same life we had known. No, the consensus was clear when we talked about what the future would look like when this collective trauma was over. The desire to get back to life as we knew it, or get back to “normal,” was not as compelling an option as you might have expected for many. Some people had concluded that they weren’t interested in getting back to “normal” at all.

Someone posited out loud, “This, too, shall pass,” but the voice inside my head was shouting, “I don’t think so!” While this group was knit together closely by shared experiences and a passion for music, no one offered the recently ubiquitous bromide “We’re all in this together.” There appeared to be tacit acknowledgement that the human suffering being experienced was horribly unequal, preferentially impacting people of color, the poor and the elderly. So, no, we actually are not “all in this together,” and no one suggested that. Some people are uniquely suffering, and some people are uniquely privileged.

And the illness, death and economic devastation of COVID-19 were not the only societal plagues swirling around us. This music class predated the events that caused the surge of social unrest in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd and many other people of color at the hands of law enforcement personnel. Even so, the sense of the group was that we were already experiencing a world thrown wildly out of control by a convergence of dark forces: the deepening anger and hostility of political divisiveness, rampant income inequality, ethnic and xenophobic intolerance, systemic racism, misogynistic workplaces and an accelerating climate crisis. And now this: COVIDFRICKING-19.

The combined effect of these potentially cataclysmic insanities was that people in the group felt like we were facing a world in utter chaos, without the sensible leadership to bring things back together. In one of the breakout groups, someone said, “Sometimes I just feel like the Dark Side is winning,” and another responded, “It’s okay not to feel okay right now.” The emotions these people had experienced as COVID-19 started to grip us had been fear, frustration, disillusionment, isolation and panic, nonetheless they all seemed now to be coming to grips with the need and desire to find a constructive path forward.

“Better than normal” was a phrase that started coming up. One person noted, “Normal is was got us into this mess. We want to get back to better than normal.” These people had clearly been doing serious thinking about what this pandemic meant to them and people on this planet, as all had been impacted to varying degrees and in different ways, some severely and tragically. And they were sensitive to the disturbing circumstances that had led up to the outbreak, its spread and the selectivity of its impacts. People of color, the poor and the elderly were getting slammed.

But this also tended to be a positively energized group, inspired by the positivity and enthusiasm of our instructors and made more so I think by interacting with kindred spirits with a common artistic enchantment: music. While there was clearly recognition that things on the planet sucked right now in a major way, there was also a shared understanding that the suffering of so many people meant we had an obligation to respond and respond urgently. I was struck by the intense compassion of the group. They felt a present price was being paid by the most vulnerable that we who were less affected and more fortunate needed to repay with action. Social action.

One of the group exercises asked us to list privately what we thought we were learning from the experience, with respect to our musicianship and more universally in our lives. What were the positive takeaways we could latch onto to try to make some sense of all the pain, suffering, dislocation and personal and financial loss we were experiencing and witnessing globally? We could share our observations in the group discussions, or not.

We started with simple things. We tried not to focus on the angst, but what we were learning from it. What was being revealed? What epiphanies were we experiencing? What were we doing differently that we wanted to keep doing when this craziness subsided?

The responses were instructive. Meals with family, eating clean, quiet time, reading, reflecting, writing, working out, contributing more time and money if we could to charity, more time with spouse / partner, playing music, practicing, meditating, helping others, volunteering, activism, commitment to change, self-care. There was clearly a theme emerging. A theme of assessment and recalibration. A theme of renewal.

Rather than focus myopically on the challenges, we focused on the things that could be positive takeaways, and there were many. One person said, “I am taking care of what I can take care of right now, no matter how simple. It’s the make your bed every morning system. There, I accomplished something positive.” Someone else suggested, “You cannot become immobilized. You have to run at the storm.” Yes, it was a bit like group therapy for 106 people. But the truth is, it helped.

I found myself really grappling with the unfairness of the suffering. The most vulnerable were getting sick and dying. The least paid were the ones getting laid off. Many of the front line workers and heroes in the crisis weren’t even making a living wage, yet were taking the biggest risks, many without even having adequate health insurance. It just seemed to me again and again that when the worst hits the fan, it’s always the underclass that gets sprayed. I’ve been thinking that about the climate crisis for decades, and now COVID just proved the point all over again, in a huge way. How can it be possible that affordable healthcare for all is still under attack? And why can’t we trust our leaders to focus on those with the most need, rather than opinion polls and the next election?

I kept coming back to the feeling that we had to find some good in this very bad situation, and we had to make our outrage actionable. It struck me that maybe the good here in all this chaos is that it is revealing once and for all how corrupt our institutions have become: unrestrained markets and unregulated capitalism, corporate greed, ineffective political leadership, rigid political orthodoxy, restricted access to affordable healthcare, deep income inequality and the failure to establish a living wage, systemic institutional racism, authoritarian government reactivity.

And maybe the good here is that the confluence of these grave social traumas has become a clarion call to action to fix the most oppressive elements of what ails us. It also kept coming back to me: the true heroes are being revealed, aren’t they? The real heroes are the underclass, healthcare workers, small business and restaurant workers, delivery people. Working people. Not sports stars, billionaires, politicians or big business people.

My question became: is this the time when we as people on this planet finally figure out what our priorities really should be? For example, we can live meaningful lives without constant professional sports, can’t we? But not so much without routine physical interactions with family and friends, right? And we absolutely cannot live without a free press that relies on facts and gets to the truth, even when it’s not pretty. Maybe enough people will finally get the picture after coping with COVID and mobilize universally against the existential threat of the climate crisis.

Is this also an opportunity to rediscover spirituality? Is this the time to recognize the value of quieting the mind? Maybe this is the Human Race’s Great Reckoning, Revelation, Epiphany, Realization and Awakening. It is clearly a time that became inspiring to this group of musicians who are seeking relief by creating art from a deeper place. The isolation, despite its initial trauma, had been an opportunity to step back, think about what mattered most and for some it became a chance to recharge, refresh and commit to sustained action through their artistic expression.

It got me thinking about discussions we had had in this class in prior years about how music (all art really) empowers us to change the world. How music and art move people to a higher plane, to higher expectations. I thought about activist musicians. Patti Smith’s song popped out at me: “People Have the Power.” Others came to mind like James Brown, who Richard Nixon reportedly thought was the most powerful man in America because of his ability to move masses of people so powerfully at an emotional level. Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, Rage Against the Machine, many more came to mind. That great snap shot of Woody Guthrie flashed in my head, that one with his guitar with the message scrawled on it: “This machine kills fascists.”

The output of this class for me was a strengthening of my belief that artists are by definition activists. Musicians, for example, seek sonic harmony and tend to be healers. We may well have lost our way. With science. With nature. With spirituality. With basic human respect. But the hope is there. The energy is there. The vibe of this group of artists was palpable for me: change it. Get back to better than normal. Artists have a unique power to move people at a gut level and obligation to lead them to the light.

There were definitely powerful positive kinetics going on in this class and this group felt it. But we wondered, will the energy last? How do we maintain the feeling when we go our separate ways? We agreed it’s up to us. It will take positivity, compassion, love, healing and empathy. It will take desire, determination, discipline, dedication and devotion. We resolved to evolve as artists. To act. To learn. To commit to spiritual growth. To reach out and touch each other in healthy, supportive ways. To lead. To be bold. To be brave. To be fierce.

“So then, what specifically are you going to do now?” Great question, thank you for asking.

Now, we design, build, write, perform, sing, act, dance, choreograph, light, produce, film, photograph, sculpt, orchestrate, direct, compose, paint, draw and create new work that moves people to action. We mobilize, set an example, inspire and energize. We speak out, agitate, lobby and protest. We confront, argue and try to convince. We work hard, give of ourselves, volunteer and donate time and money if we can. We love.

And we vote. We encourage and help others to vote. Because the People Have the Power.

“and my senses newly opened…I awakened to the cry…that the people have the power…to redeem the work of fools…upon the meek the graces shower…it’s decreed the people rule” Patti Smith

And now the work begins: to get to back to better than normal. Can’t wait for that.

(Original artwork by Joan E. Hargate)