So what fills your missing piece?

So I wrote a little post last week on the longings that each of us carry around inside which apparently only one person bothered to read (thanks SoHoS), but I find that it is a topic that I'm really not ready to let go of yet. I've really always considered myself to be a "simple" person, although I know one person who vehemently and adamantly disagrees with this contention. Yet the more I consider the issue, as it pertains to myself, the more I find that it is a complex and multifaceted issue. It isn't just identifying those longings, it is recognizing what speaks to them, what calls to them, and what fills the gap between these things. David Baerwald was right: "The more I learn, I find how little I really know."

For me, music, by itself, or with words has always been able to evoke images in my head that are so real that I feel them, and have always done it in a way that words alone never have been able to convey. The real mystery for me is that the passage of time or repetition ad nauseum does not seem to dilute these reactions. The Cowboy Junkies album 'The Trinity Sessions' still gives me chills when I listen to it. The music always fills the space I listen in, and wraps around me like a child's favorite blanket, putting me at ease and dropping every defense. I can't help but to sway in time, with my eyes shut, drinking in every note and breathy pause. In contrast, Don Henley's song "The Boys of Summer", which was played to death still always makes me think of the cusp of adulthood and the days when it just seems that no one can come out and play anymore. U2's "The Joshua Tree", and its codicil, "Rattle and Hum" are so rife with spiritual longing without actually saying it directly that I still marvel that there are people who just never seem to get it. I guess I always considered it to be such a testimony of the zeitgeist of our times that, aside with their later "Actung Baby", which in many ways is a commiseration with those who were never able to make the intuitive leap to the underlying quest of "The Joshua Tree", or who were in some ways tied to those that couldn't, which represented expressions of musical empathy as much as it was a catharsis for individuals in that band, I have always been disappointed with their subsequent efforts.

Somehow, these things don't just speak to, or for the longings. They feed the need to have them understood. It is a reassurance that someone "gets it", and that you aren't alone with that tiny voice inside. Some times that simple validation is all we need. Which brings me to my point. What fills that gap for you, reader? The comforting "thwok" of a well hit golfball? The look in your child's eye when they finally understand the math problem? The rev of the engine you worked on all day? The feeling you have after clearing every file off your desk at the end of the day?

C'mon. Fess up.