Art and Creativity: Memories Delivered by Music

I once read that audio memories can be some of the strongest we have.

That is to say, hearing a certain piece of music from our past has the potential to very clearly send our mind back to the moment (or moments) in the past when we first heard that piece of music.

Or perhaps to a time when we often heard that music.

For no particular reason, I ended up looking at my YouTube channel today and realized that I had a couple of playlists we used to run at the Red Dragonfly Gallery back when it existed in brick-and-mortar space... so just for grins I decided to give one of them a play.

It was interesting to experience just how much hearing these particular tunes — in some sense — transported me back to the feelings of sitting in our cozy little gallery surrounded by so much creativity and artistic expression.

It brought me back to monthly "Gallery Nights;" to days of the store filled with visitors; to cold rainy days where I often spent the entire day completely in solitude. It brought me back to our opening day; to our final day, and to the sad few hours as we emptied the last few things out and locked the door, one final time.

Three years have passed — for all intents and purposes — since we closed the gallery, but hearing that music again reminded me as much of the good times as it did of the not so good times.

These days, however, I remain quite grateful that we did decide to close.

Not only does the economy seem to be sinking to new lows — which is generally a very bad situation for the art business — but we recently had an extreme weather event in our little town once again very similar to the one that flooded the entire arcade of shops where we were located back in 2017.

Ironically, when we had that afternoon of extreme rainfall the first time around it was described as a "500-year event" and only five years later we apparently had another "500-year event."

Global warming, anyone?

Well, not going to get hung up on that particular detail. However, I thought it was noteworthy that I got to relive those moments however briefly, as a result of listening to that old playlist.

I think I'll hang onto it, for a while longer...

Thanks for stopping by, and do please leave a comment if you feel inspired to do so!

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