The world has become a scary place. Now, I do not know if the world recently underwent a major transformation that turned it from the safe bubble of general contentment that I knew as a child or if things have actually gotten worse, but I have never been so scared of listening to the news. I love politics, not the political nonsense and gridlock that has become synonymous with American democracy, but the intrigue of elections and the psychology of why people believe what they do. I enjoy being informed, reminding myself that the world is bigger than Ann Arbor, Michigan and that the United States is only a small part of collective whole. Yet, every time I turn on the news I am bombarded by story after story with a very clear message: terrorists, global warming, school shooters, Democrats, and Republicans are all coming to get you and there is nothing you or anyone else can do about it.
Being a worrier, I find myself thinking about everything that could go wrong all too often. I consider where I sit in the computer labs on campus and always know where my exits are, I am tricked by packaging that says “Natural” and “Organic” and I have found myself looking over my shoulder as I walk through a deserted parking lot after a long night in the lab at the slighted rustle of branches. Through all of the media hype, fear mongering and the concern that lingers in the back of my mind, there is one place where I have always felt that the trajectory of the world is not a downward spiral, and even if it is, that we can fix it.
There is something about the music school on North Campus which insulates it from the rest of the world. Perhaps it is that it is on North Campus – an entire bus ride away from classes graded on a curve – or that it is small enough that every music student at least vaguely recognizes another, or maybe it is the music itself. The idea that while music is performed in every language imaginable, at it’s core music is universal and greater than it’s sum of parts. The notion that a performance can provide a respite from a world on the brink of disaster, and the knowledge that performance has served that same purpose for the past 1,000 years.
There are days when the media gets to me, days when the stress of an upcoming exam is overpowered by the unpredictability of a world that I cannot control. Those are the days when I feel blessed to have found a home on North Campus because there is something about the pond sort of shaped like a piano, and a building that is supposed to look like piano keys that blocks out the uncertainty, gently reminding me that as long as we have music we can survive another 1,000 years on the brink of disaster.
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