On the one thing absolutely all of us are searching for
This week I've been thinking about how we all need human connection and of the different places we find it
Last night, I stood in the muffled darkness of backstage in a huge music venue in Washington DC, and watched as a band of four musicians gathered together for a few moments of stillness. That band was Keane, and seconds later, the bright lights of the stage sliced open the darkness as a curtain was pulled back, and that stepped onto stage. Accompanying them was the devoted roar of six thousand devoted fans.
Later that night, I lay in bed awake for a long time, their music still moving inside me, thinking about what I’d heard and witnessed in that moment; their music was powerful, and I heard a woman, probably about my age, telling her friend “These guys in Keane have been with me through some of the biggest and smallest moments of my life. I’ve been loving this band for over two decades.” Her words stayed with me, and I thought of the way certain songs, certain snatches of music, certains bands and musicians hold an especially intimate place in our emotional lives, since we associate their work with some of the most heightened, or important, times of our lives. And in that moment I realised it wasn’t purely the music which had drawn thousands of people to that auditorium. Of course it was the music first, but beyond the joy of the sounds and shapes of the songs, what the music was giving everyone, all of us - the fans, the musicians, the roadies, even 12-year-old Evangeline and her friend Shaw, who had come with me and stood with me as we watched the band going onstage - was something that absolutely every single one of us is craving in almost everything we do, which is to feel a very real, almost tangible, sense of human connection. Where we find it, how we find it, and what happens when we don’t find it, effects us all in different ways, but I’ve started to think that an abscence of it might be the cause of absolutely everything that goes wrong in life.