Great Albums Are Like Great Lives

My girlfriend and I share a car from 1996 which crazily enough these days, is considered vintage.

In any case, the sound system has a CD stack in the boot and a tape deck in the front and after a recent trip to the flea markets, we have some tapes to play.

Unlike Spotify, where you can go to any song you like, or cds, where you can skip any songs you don’t like, tapes - you’re pretty much stuck with listening to one side of the album til the end, then you flip it over and listen to the other.

So you really want your tapes to be great.

A good album has a couple of singles that we love on it and the rest of the songs, we’re happy to miss. A great album is one where we love all the singles but wouldn’t dare skip a b side and indeed, they contain some of our favourite moments.

Which got me thinking about life these days. We’re so busy skipping the “boring” parts and just looking for the highlights, maybe we’re missing the point. We don’t want any “b” sides in our life - and we’ll do what we can to avoid them. Maybe we’ll have a few drinks to make an event seem interesting, or take some drugs, recreational or prescription, to mask an underlying pain or unhappiness. Or maybe we’ll just wish it was the weekend, on Monday, or that retirement would hurry up and arrive, even though we’re not even close to so called “retirement” age.

If we’re constantly trying to get to the next single, our life might be good, or at least the highlights might be, but we’re not living our best lives. 

If we’re living our best lives, we love the b sides as much as the singles.

From the Vedic perspective, the process is the outcome, the journey is the destination, and the more and more we’re in tune, the more we realise that every moment is a gift, a greatest hit, a beat to be enjoyed. 

If we want our lives to be great albums and not just a bunch of singles, we need to unwind the lifetime of accumulated stress that might be making the hidden gems seem like tracks to skip. The best way I know how to do this is via the twice daily practice of Vedic meditation - a sure way to turn your life into an unskippably great album.

*The bulk of the White Album, by the Beatles, was conceived in Rishikesh, India whilst they were under the spiritual guidance of my teachers’ teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.