Flow

In my teens and early 20s, I spent a lot of time onstage. From school choir, class plays and drama club, I transitioned into community theater productions for a few years, then had a brief career delivering singing telegrams – which is a hybrid of exotic dancing and camp theater, so it totally counts.

After I got married, I still enjoyed a few theater roles and karaoke for a while, but sometime in my early 30s, I developed crippling stage fright. It was right around the same time I began an extramarital affair, so the Freudian analysis is an easy one, though only in retrospect. I literally lost my voice when I stopped speaking the truth.

Poetic rhapsodies aside, the point is that I haven’t been onstage in a long time. And I thought maybe that was okay, maybe that part of my life was simply relegated to the past. But over the past year or so, I have found myself missing music more and more. Stacy really fueled my ache to sing again by calling me songbird and appearing in awe every time I sang with the car radio.

Recently, my friend Jess put me in touch with a local Gaelic choir group looking for new members. As soon as she mentioned that they go to Scotland to sing every year, I wholeheartedly and unequivocally said yes.

After only one month and one performance with this small but mighty group of talented and super-nice people, I can tell you that this is absolutely what’s been missing in my life for a long, long time.

Singing with a Gaelic choir combines the two activities that reverberate most deeply in my soul: singing in harmony with other voices and learning a new language.

I have only made the shallowest scratches on the very surface of the deeply vexing enigma that is the Gaelic language, but it has already captured the attention of my brain’s language center. The words look nothing at all like the English and French words I am accustomed to reading, and the phonetics have not yet lined up to the spelling in my mind’s eye. I wrote my own phonetic interpretations in my musical score for our performance. The word “thall” we pronounce like “howl.” The word “ghleann” is something like “glown.” And “chaoil” sounds kind of like “hewel.” Crazy.

The element that helps these ad hoc translations make sense is the music. At the Highland Games in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, yesterday, I heard some of my colleagues sing a capella and accompanied solos in the language. Another woman sang a Gaelic love song and accompanied herself on the harp.

Without understanding one word of the lyrics, I felt a range of emotions during their performances. The woman with the harp was clearly singing a blissful love song in a delicate lilt. My choir colleague Anne roused my spirit with a fiery ballad that seemed to speak of the aftermath of battle. After exiting the stage, she got a little teary and told me it was a lament of a woman who lost loved ones in war. A group of performers I caught on another stage sang a jaunty tune that conjured images of barroom camaraderie and celebration.

Because I am singing the tenor part these days – I was a soprano in my youth, but now my range has mellowed and narrowed a bit – I am very aware of the harmonic layers and interplay of intervals in the music. Having words that contain no semantic meaning actually makes this easier for me. I am not singing words but vowel sounds. In that way, I very easily become so immersed in the harmony that I forget we are separate voices.

I saw a documentary not long ago entitled, “Happy,” about self-reported happiness around the globe and how people define what makes them happy in life. From the poverty-ridden slums of India to the dense urban jungles of New York City, people outlined the elements of their lives that helped them feel happy. Once basic needs of food and shelter were met, money did not rank high on the lists.

One element that crossed cultures, languages and geography was the idea of “flow.” The experience of flow happens when a person is performing some activity that requires skill at a level where their conscious mind goes quiet and they seem to be acting without thought. For example, one man in the documentary had worked at a restaurant in NYC flipping burgers for most of his adult life, yet he reported very high levels of happiness in his life. In addition to making enough money to live modestly and having family nearby, he reached a point nearly every day at work where he orchestrated myriad tasks on the grill with swift, easy skill. He said something about being super busy, with hundreds of orders flooding in, and just finding a rhythm in the work that felt like flow.

That describes how I feel singing “Ghleann Bhaile Chaoil”with the Gaelic choir. For a fleeting moment at each rehearsal and for a time when we were onstage yesterday, I felt a rapturous freedom in my soul. The only thing that existed for me in that split-second was the sound coming from my throat and joining with the sounds of my colleagues. Our combined vibrations seemed to lift and hold us in mid-air for a moment that hung, resounded and dissipated with joy.