Musical Milestones

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.

– Plato

It is commonly known that your sense of smell is one of the most powerful when it comes to evoking memory. While I am not challenging this notion (any whiff of aspen or pine trees sends me right back to my summer camp in Colorado), I believe that music can be just as powerful of a memory bank.

I’ve realized that over the years, I have collected a few “musical milestones” — a song that instantly transports you back to a point in your life, carries you away into nostalgia and recollection. A song can sometimes define certain turning points better than any other media — it captures emotion through chords and lyric and preserves it.

Here are some of the songs that make up my most notable “musical milestones” and the memories to which they are tied:

Moving to San Antonio, Texas (Fall 2008)

Montreal (Summer 2009)

Moving to Las Vegas (Summer 2010)

Freshman year fall (2010)

Sophomore year spring (2012)

Junior year fall (2012)

New York City (Summer 2013)

In just two days, I will be celebrating the one year anniversary of See. Like. Blog. In some ways, I cannot believe it has already been a year — time has flown thanks to a generous series of adventures, of which I could have never imagined when I started writing last August. I am different from where I began and this post is particularly significant because it gives me a chance to reflect on the big changes that have occurred thus far. These definitive shifts have been happy, sad, scary, exciting, joyful, awe-inspiring and, combined, have shaped me into the person writing all of these thoughts tonight. I hope you, my readers (and listeners), have enjoyed my musical milestones, as I hold these songs closest to my heart.

More adventures and celebration to come.