For the record
Given the frenetic pace of our society, we struggle to embrace the concept of slowing down. We want everything now, and for the most part, we can often get it that quickly too.We get frustrated beyond belief by so many things:
if a website doesn’t load instantly
if our coffee isn’t in our hands within 5 minutes of just stepping foot in a cafe
if our electricity cuts out during a storm
if our mail arrives a couple of hours later than anticipated
if we don’t tick off all of our to do list in a day
if a flight is delayed, etc
Aghhh the list could go on, and we continue to go on living like this, as if, it’s our life purpose to become the most efficient life form on earth. This progression of humankind is making people more unhappy, discontented and restless, slowly eating away at us from the inside, and robbing us of joy, our ability to smile and to just be.
Over the last few years we’ve been making small consistent changes to the way we choose to live our life. These changes haven’t been too radical, and they certainly haven’t happened over night, but the impact has been dramatic.
From changing the way we purchase, eat and share our food to our dietary preferences, to being more conscious of where we spend our dollars and being responsible for our individual impact on the environment. We’ve made a commitment to being more aware, kind, and respectful to all those who serve us, and we gain joy from experience, rather than searching for it through “stuff”.
As the year neared its end, and the silly season drew us back into it’s fast pace, we found ourselves back in front of a tv of an evening, music was played less, and all stillness filled with a social media scroll. Lucky for us it was only about 3 weeks until this became apparent, and so we thought of a new way to jump back into the slow lane. Enter: The Record Player – Probably one of our favourite christmas presents to boot!
Now we love music, in fact in the first 6 months of our relationship we didn’t even watch tv, but with a cheap spotify subscription and/or anything you want accessible via youtube this doesn’t really help us to minimise our screen time, and if I’m totally honest is nowhere near as enjoyable as delving through a record store, finding a pearler for $15 and getting it home and playing it on repeat for the evening.
One thing we also never knew, was how many recent artists have released their albums on record, so if you’re reading this and thinking you would struggle listening to classics like Floyd, Hendrix and the Beatles all the time, then fear not- we also just got our hands on some Incubus, The xx and Mura Masa.
The result? Our tv has been on twice all week 1) only for the latest vikings ep and 2) for UFC, baby seems to go wild every time music is played ( i think we have a musical maverick on our hands), we’ve been falling back in love with artists and songs we haven’t listened too for ages, and…….. when telstra has an outage for days during this stormy season (which it will), we’ll still have our music!
They say music is thriving, but the business is dying thanks to piracy and the arrival of iTunes, which destroyed the notion of an album in favour for a single downloadable track. I’ll be the first to admit i’m guilty of using these mediums in the past, but feel much better now knowing that I’m paying for/and respecting the music that’s been created; it’s a fair exchange really when you consider all the feels we get from music.
So for the record (insert smug laugh), we are really embracing this forgotten concept of “waiting”. Waiting for a new record to be released, waiting to get home to listen to our favourite tunes, and waiting for an ordered record to arrive, you’d be surprised how refreshing it is to not have everything so accessible.