Sound and life by Zainab Imran
Life exists as vibrations. We are fully composed of infinite particles, all alive, all in motion; ecstatic,
profound, boundless and free. In fact, this core of our existence relays our module of being, into an
ephemeral connection with consciousness and contextuality. As much as we would like to believe
otherwise, existence dwells on. It spirals back into presence in a considerate composition of careful,
conscious disposition, even when the human perception of life and breath is lost.
In classical physics, when two vibrations meet in synchronization, they superpose each other,
producing a resultant of the contributing amplitudes. This proliferation can be condensed and traced
back to the origin of life itself. It is then, in between the reverberations of life and what connects life,
that often at times, we come across a melody or another that reaches us in what was left in tune with
what was out there. It’s a profound, meaningful and abundant unification of who we are and what is
being offered to us, becoming an existence of one as whole and whole in one, grounding our reality
into belonging and wanting to belong and verily reinforcing the realization that nothing about us can
ever really exist in complete isolation.
There’s so much to put into the math of learning how a simple tune can, at times, shatter a beating,
living heart into fragments in grief and also build it up and put it all back together and one can only
estimate the capacity these reckless particles uphold in bringing out so much of who we are and what
we conceal through their reverberations.
Forming when the first string of a guitar is pricked, the waves are transitioned into a tune, and the
particles around the instrument are shoved from their positions, creating a force which urges them to
find a rhythm that births into existence a melody, meeting another melody, and eventually reaches us
to foster our own lost symphony by affirming its existence.
In so much of the wilderness we create of our existence, the fundamental process of ‘being’ pertains,
never losing us; to talk, to hear to see, to touch, to communicate, to listen, to feel and to interpret. All
that goes around in our belonging and finding the feeling of belonging.
From the time of the first call of prayer in the baby’s ear, to the proclamation of death when we are
laid to rest, we have learnt to appreciate the harmony of notes, and through it find a proclamation of
our own.
One can encapsulate that sound is merely an evolution of the process of learning to relate to one
another. Each way, a different one, and ever so, an important one. Its fundamental existence, like all
existences around us, is humane and the epiphany is left only to be differentiated by how much we
can share and receive through our reverberations.
And maybe that too is why the meaning of our existence can never truly be lost, though less yearned
for, but never really lost.