Shuffle

Listening to the radio is like sitting in meditation: you tune in to receive the energy current of what’s being transmitted now. If you are tuned in to the most beautiful song ever you simply enjoy it, because it’s unsure whether you will get to possess it. Maybe the DJ will announce afterwards the song or maybe he won’t and you will have loved and lost the most beautiful song you’d ever heard. Songs stream constantly out through the radio like water through your fingers, it disperses organically into the air, without a trace, just like the always flowing stream of the moment.

There is this hanging on the edge of the line feeling radio gives.
It keeps you engaged because you never know what will come next.

Or you wade your way through the radio waves for the sake of your favorite song—you listen all day, maybe switching between channels, just praying to hear your jam. This cultivates patience and perseverance, and when you finally do hear the song it is so rewarding. I remember listening to modern rock radio all night long impatiently awaiting my favorite songs. We would call and request and wait hours for the song to shuffle in the mix. Now we never have to wait longer than our slowed down broadband download time to hear or watch whatever we can think of. But there goes the relaxing quality Lately, I have rediscovered ‘Shuffle’ and it is reconnecting me to this spontaneity of music listening the iPod and digital music has made me forget.

Letting go of control
Relieving the responsibility of doership, knowing what you want
Ordering, sometimes it is nice to be surprised, to be served the mystery.
In our modern sense that only we know what we want, we have cut off the open-endedness of gifts, randomness, surprise. Just let life’s jukebox play, there’s a pressure to make everything the end all and be all, but it limits the possibilities from the beyond.