This past year moved like a change of seasons, not the kind you notice all at once. The kind that happens quietly while you're busy living inside it. Things shifted. What mattered, rearranged itself. Old chapters loosened their grip, and something else began asking for attention. I didn't always know how to hold all of that. But music did. You can't always get what you want. The first time that song really noticed me was years ago. I had just lost an eBay auction. It was nothing important, nothing life changing, but right on cue, that song started playing and at the time it felt a tad frustrating, like something just slipped through my fingers. But that moment left a mark. And this past year, for reasons I don't fully understand, I remembered that moment again, but I remembered it as a Music Ghost stories moment. This time. Not a coincidence, just a feeling like someone or something was still paying attention. Music has a way of doing that. It doesn't always announce itself. It just sometimes shows up. My life really moved through those seasons last year. Maybe yours did too, some moments chosen some not A good book I listened to at the time said we're not a product of circumstance, we're a product of our decisions. And I felt that I spent a lot of time at my parents' house. My parents are both gone now, so. The home was left to me and my sister, a place we both grew up in a place learning how to let go now, and in the middle of all that change, music somehow found its way in not loudly, just right on time a. There was a lot of late nights spent fixing the place up. But one night while my sister and I were there working, she played a song on her Bluetooth speaker, color My World. I knew it instantly. Or at least I thought I did. I had known that song my whole life as just a piano melody, something for my childhood, because my dad and my sister would play that song all the time on the piano. What I didn't know is where it came from. My sister said It's Chicago, which stopped me because I had just started listening to all of my dad's old records. I even purchased a vinyl record cleaner off of Facebook marketplace and some solution, like I've been cleaning my dad's records up putting them on the turntable. and no kidding. When I go home that night, the record that I had cleaned that morning and prepared on that turntable to play later was Chicago. and it's the exact record that color my world was on. It just starts playing again On the same physical medium that my dad once held, touched, played, and listened. There's something about that vinyl crackle. About sound moving through an object that once belonged to him. That was a bit of a music ghost stories moment too. Just straight synchronicity. While going through my parents' attic, I found a bag of my childhood toys, things my parents had saved, stored, and then forgotten. I brought'em home. I didn't wanna throw'em away. Plus Donny's getting to be that age now where he is interested in toys. I will tell you more about it later, but that June another season arrived, my wife and I welcomed our second son, Anthony, to the world. So imagine that Tom Hanks movie Money Pit, but your wife is pregnant the whole time. That's what a lot of this year felt like. All that changed though when she went into labor on her birthday. By the way, we had a radio station playing quietly in the hospital room. Just like we did with Donnie, so nothing curated or intentional and those songs drifted through again. It just felt like gentle affirmations. The temptations get ready, Sam and Dave, hold on, I'm coming. It felt symbolic in a way, but it was more so the music just saying, you're here now. Nothing else matters. There's another lesson I learned, I think from that same book I mentioned earlier. And it's about courage, and it says, courage isn't the absence of fear. It's just prioritizing the other things. Above that, throughout the past year, I started journaling too. It's like this podcast episode, but imagine yourself talking to yourself about your life. It really just zooms things out. I started journaling partly to escape all the noise, but as a result, I could really understand it all better. It helped me see how quickly the mind latches on to the wants. And how quietly life just keeps offering what's needed instead. Still practicing meditation, gifted that clarity, I, I keep trying to do it in honor of my mom, just to be quiet and still, and truly listen, and of course, a lot of our guests on this podcast talk about meditation, which has influenced me a lot too. So even while I wasn't speaking here, I was still listening. And as a matter of fact, right after our last episode, a song came to me. It was about my mom and it felt exactly how we discussed that topic in our conversations here. It didn't feel like it was something that I was writing or that I wrote or that I even made up. I just heard it playing in my head as if it existed already, Like I was just tuning into that station, and that's always fascinated me, the idea that music isn't created, it's discovered that the signal's already there. Maybe this year I can record it here in my home studio and play it back for you. Awesome. In November. We had a death in the family and I've always felt a special connection toward this person. His body had grown quiet through the years living with a LS. His speech had left, but music hadn't, and that stayed with me. That even when language fails, music still knows how to reach us. It doesn't need a translator. Rick always had a strong connection to music, and I got it. I understood it. December is when I tidied up my garage at home. Something I had been putting off throughout the whole year, and it was just, it got to the point where it was such a pain getting those decorations in and out. But I mentioned those bag of toys earlier they were in the garage, so I brought them inside the house and then time went by and Christmas came, and right around Christmas. My son, Donnie brings something in his hand and I, I didn't recognize it. I was like, what is this? And then it occurred to me like, oh, he found that bag. I go and look and he has the bag open and he's sorting through all these toys that I haven't touched since I was a little kid. And my parents never met my children, at least not in this world, but. Standing there watching him play, felt like a message from my mom and dad saying, Merry Christmas. And somewhere through all this, I, I really don't know at what point, but I had a dream. I was, years into the future, everything was a beam of light and I was dropping off my son at school for the first time I was holding my son's hand, walking him down the hall, and there was a point where I had to let go and he ran towards those other kids full of joy, other kids that were just like him. And I just stayed there behind. I. He reminded me how important this time is right now through all the noise and distraction. My boys are here with me, and sometimes that's enough. It's a quiet reminder that all of our wants are just temporary, and if we try sometimes. We just might find we have what we need.