#CoronaConundrums: How Music Equipped Me For A Pandemic – Eshaan Sood

For some people, staying at home for three weeks straight is driving them crazy, for some others, the fact that they cannot meet their friends is unfathomable. Someone else is struggling to do all the extra chores at home while someone else is bored of eating the same home-cooked food every day and the experiments in the kitchen aren’t really working out.

Being a musician has uniquely equipped me to face a lot of these challenges and maybe there are some takeaways for even people who do not play or practice music in this sharing.

As I see it, we face mainly two types of challenges – Internal and External. Yes, we can argue that they are the same but that is for a different post.

Some of the internal challenges I have heard some friends/family members share sound like this – I am bored and have nothing to do. I cannot deal with sitting in my room the whole day. I have so many thoughts and emotions and there is only so much I can share on social media or through a video call.

To address the first couple of ones that deal with staying at home, as a musician I learnt that the only way to get better at playing was to sit down and work stuff out in a practice room. There are all these stories of music school students flexing about the number of hours they spend in a practice room. It is really common to be in music school and hear someone say “ I could only practice for 4 hours today”. Having a skill that requires work in solitude has made it super easy for me to not go stir crazy sitting in my room. As a take away for someone reading this who doesn’t play music, while the skill to sit and work on something alone for long hours is not going to suddenly instil itself in you, maybe this could be a time to at least start the process of identifying a skill or hobby that you could start investing towards. My sister has taken to making homemade scrunchies and badges, the dining table looks like a craft store (!!) but we all get a new scrunchie at the end of it.

The second problem in this whole situation is people not being able to deal with all the emotions that pop up in their own mind. As a songwriter, I luckily have a medium of songs to express the emotion/s I am feeling. Sometimes I just write lyrics and sometimes it is a piece of music and the meaning is a little more abstract. Either way, usually through the process I sort out whatever I am feeling within my self and it finds some kind of expression. Again, for people who do not play music, there are few techniques that I have used/heard of that sometimes help let out pent up emotions.

One that I really really like is called Free Writing. All you have to do is take a pencil and paper (pen) and without a filter start writing. Give yourself a time limit, say five minutes and continuously write for five minutes. Do not stop and do not think about what you are writing. Do this a couple of times and then maybe read it. You might enjoy what you wrote and if not and it makes you sad, throw the paper (!)

The second one that I like is called Action Painting. If you have some paint lying around you can use that, if not you can mix things like turmeric and sindoor in water and all you have to do is to dip a paintbrush or old toothbrush and flick it on to your paper/surface. Just think about whatever is bothering you and flick away. When you feel satisfied you can stop and voila you just turned your frustration into abstract expressionism! Just make sure you do this in a place where you cant splash paint onto something you care about otherwise you are in for a second round of pochha after this (!)

I would love to go on and on about how practising music and meditating are leaving me unscathed in this pandemic but I understand the attention span of an internet wanderer.

Until next time, stay safe, stay home and take good care!