I recently wrote an essay about the power of harmony. To be truthful, I was trying to find parallels between my life and music and harmony seemed to stick the best. In music, harmony happens when two or more different notes come together to make a chord— a building of different sounds to make one beautiful sound. For musicians and vocalists, finding the right harmony can be frustrating sometimes, but mostly satisfying and rewarding. For fans of music, how well the harmonies in a song come together are usually what keep us from hitting next on our Spotify playlist.
But harmony in life is more complicated. Sometimes we try to live our lives differently and it doesn’t work. Sometimes we try for years or decades and nothings seems like it works. We are all, at some point or another, searching for a way to make life work. We are all trying to find success and happiness and fun and enough sleep and some way for all those things to come together. But in life, harmony is sometimes more difficult than in music. If you cannot find harmony in life, it plagues every day. When music’s harmony is off, we just skip the song.
I wish I had the answer, but I don’t. What I do know, what I’ve learned and what I spent more than a few hours writing about, is that we can lead better lives when we are concerned about the harmony of the other. We are all battling the same kinds of demons, we are all facing human experience together— whether you are white, black, brown, male, female, christian, muslim, hindu, or buddhist, our most important commonality is that we are human. It is a lot easier to get enough sleep at night, to laugh without worry, to work hard when you know someone is on your team.
No one wins when our voices are silenced, when we cannot speak on behalf of the oppressed. No one wins when we detain people that look different from us in airports and tell others that the United States does not exist to give them a better life, despite the fact that that is exactly how the United States was founded. I cannot find harmony in my fortunate and privileged life if I have to live with the knowledge that I am not doing something or enough to help my fellow human. I fight and argue and live in outrage for the sake of their lives because I hope that one day, when I need it, someone holds their picket sign for me.
Harmony in our own lives is important, but it will not exist unless we, as a collective human whole, are doing more for each other. We do not exist alone, we are not meant to live life alone. The important part of harmony is that it never occurs with one note. And while harmony might mean getting all the parts of your small, personal life together, you are still just one collective note. It is how we come together to help, to heal, to improve the world that ultimately matters.
