Recommended
March 31, 2024
Recommended
Pollen swirls on the river current, HLAA’s annual conference offers solid ground for anyone with hearing loss, and Matt Hay’s memoir can stir your soul.
Upcoming Conference June 26–29, 2024
Hearing Loss Association of America hosts this year’s convention in Phoenix, Arizona:
Discover the newest accessible technology
Learn skills for living your best life with hearing loss
Connect with hundreds of people with hearing loss from around the U.S.
If you can make it to Phoenix, GO! The event will be worth your time!
Alas, I will miss it this year. —I recently lost a longtime friend who was formative to my sense of music and life, and his memorial is happening at the same time as the conference. If you go, please let me know what you learn!
A Worthwhile Read
I just read an extraordinary memoir, Soundtrack of Silence: Love, Loss, and a Playlist for Life. It is beyond inspiring. By “beyond inspiring,” I mean motivating. Maxims I’ve heard before and recognized as grounded advice, yet inevitably dismissed or filed away as “later for that,” registered as personal, pertinent, and urgent.
Author Matt Hay describes his journey into deafness— a trajectory I find utterly frightening. A loving relationship and a tenacious will form the core of the narrative, which he frames with references to song lyrics and visceral descriptions of music.
In breaks from reading, I found myself paying special attention to all the sounds around me, and marveling at the fact that I could hear them. As a musician, I may be sensitized to the references, but the story is really one of surmounting the insurmountable. It helps that the story is well told, leavened with dashes of humor, and embedded with insight.
I know for instance that “memory is a perishable asset,” but I’d oddly assumed that keeping it was the luck of the draw. The assertion that memory “has to be burnished on a regular basis” resounded as a clarion call. It's motivated me to wipe away cobwebs from formative experiences, invite sound and images from the past, dust debris from the day-to-day and consciously register the present.
The other big kicker for me came in statements I’ve heard before, but somehow never managed to act upon consistently: “You only progress by doing the work… The only way to train yourself to be disciplined is to make the mundane work part of your daily routine.”
I’d been given that advice before, but daunted by the pain and boredom of “mundane work” I couldn’t stick with it. Somehow Matt Hay’s palpable description of how that practice enabled him to navigate incredibly challenging terrain, emboldened me with a sense of, “If he can do that, I can do what I need to do.”
And what is it that I need to do? Stay tuned!