Query

Maybe I'm getting spiritual in my old age, flaky. Maybe it's all the therapy. But lately, when I'm driving in my car, I find I can utterly ground myself by listening to the stereo. A good song comes on and it makes the drive worthwhile: I zoom, I feel a part of the world, for a moment everything is good and exactly how it is supposed to be. I am driving and I am getting somewhere and the music is good. It's all right, everything is all right, and those topics that vex me — stressful practice, doomed marriage — recede, they disappear, and all that's left is the highway and the cars on it, the car ahead, the car behind.

Figure. Photo by: Fred Sebastian

What I achieve is immanence, a manner of religious experience in which, to my understanding, everything is contained within. I have a completeness, which extends to purpose: I have something to do, a simple task, moving from point A to point B, and it's made perfect by the soundtrack. I'm buoyed by the soundtrack. I'm transmogrifying the sound into the feeling of satisfaction.

I know, I know. It's just driving home from work. Just how strange has Ursus become?

The thing is, I don't care. I love the drive home, it's both short and eternal, a half-hour of sedate driving and listening that makes me feel good. I can take pleasure from this simple thing, whereas before I rushed to work, I rushed home, I had a purpose and that was to get to my destination in the shortest time possible, I had work to do, after all. Work to do. It was a treadmill, endless, and now I feel free, free from the treadmill.

Do you know what I mean? To possess oneself, to know one's surroundings, to be satisfied with the same, to feel free? To listen to Keane's Somewhere Only We Know and feel guilty pleasure at the piano-driven syrupy lyrics; to rock out, I mean absolutely rock out, to the Foo Fighters' Everlong, to U2's Beautiful Day (an obvious choice, I know, but such a monumental tune, such a sunny-sky tonic deserves inclusion), to the Tragically Hip's apoplectic Blow at High Dough. None of these songs are part of my collection, perhaps explaining the power they have over me. When one of these comes on, I feel as if something has been affirmed, I feel a rightness that is, in the end, inexplicable, perhaps I can get as close as this: for a 5-minute interval, I feel chosen.

It's an illusion, I know, but it's a powerful one, a welcome one. Who wants to feel alone in their car, who wants to feel alone at all? I feel part of a larger existence when a good song comes on, part of a design.

Perhaps I should stop here.

— Dr. Ursus