By Aaron Rowland
Guest Writer
There is not one person among us who has not at some time or another used music to cope with a difficult situation.
You break up with your significant other and immediately turn on your favorite album to help drown out your thoughts. You are overlooked for a promotion or fail a test, and you head home and put on something to cheer you up.
It seems a natural thing to try to find a way to deal with pain, but is it healthy?
Know that I am in no way saying that listening to music is bad or that using it to cope with stress is bad. But I am posing the question: Is it healthy?
Not all that is good is healthy. Chocolate is good, but too much is not healthy. So it is with any good thing — too much is not healthy.
And so I believe is the case in my generation and our love of music.
If our time spent listening is primarily to escape from our other senses, then I would say that is not a healthy use of our God-given sense of hearing.
When we use music to escape our emotions, we neglect something more important than feeling good: our ability to suffer rightly.
But if we use it to direct that pain upward and control it, it becomes a boon to our spiritual growth.
We are so focused on avoiding pain of any kind that we tend to turn to artificial means in order to escape what is meant to be used to teach our bodies and minds.
Pain is part of a two-sided coin. Pain and love must come together, and pain at the right time can be just as healthy for us as love.
A fire is a healthy part of the life cycle of a forest. It helps to burn away the trash and undergrowth but doesn’t harm what is established and matured and, in fact, promotes the older growth to continue growing.
Too much pain can destroy, however, the same as too much fire can burn down the forest.
This is where coping comes in. We can use music and other means to cope and help manage those senses, which seem to be going haywire. The potential for destruction, however, does not make a thing inherently evil.
Pain helps to purify us, and love helps to grow us, so when we ignore the world, put on the tunes and pray it will all blow over, this is the unhealthy side of music.
Aaron Rowland is a senior media communications major.
