It's OK to be not OK

I was quiet for a few days last week. I knew I was feeling a bit down, but couldn’t put my finger on what it was that was causing it.

And whenever this happens I retreat into myself. My wife noticed it and between us we were trying to figure out what was up.

Nothing was obvious, until it was. The most obvious thing of all.

The pandemic. No gigs. Missing the buzz of live performance, the racket of a crowd. The energy you get back as a result feeding you for the next few days. Personal interactions. The financial stability gigs bring. People smiling, dancing, clapping, cheering. I miss it all.

And it hit me last week. Probably for the first time. I had been so busy trying to get on with things that there was no room to miss it. Until it found a way in, as it always will.

For a bit of context, I’m fine, thanks. People have had to deal with all sorts of terrible things over the last 14-15 months, and on the scale of things, what I experienced wasn’t that bad. It lasted a few days. I could still function. But nevertheless I believe it’s important for us all to acknowledge how we feel, and to try and get to the bottom of things when something is up 

So why am I doing so in public like this?

Well, firstly to say it’s OK not to be OK. I was inspired last weekend by Naoise Devaney, a young local singer with whom I have worked regularly over the years. She posted a video on her YouTube channel in which she spoke honestly about some difficulties she has been having in her life. She said that if her sharing her story helped one person then it would have been worth it, and she’s right.

And secondly, well I don’t really have another reason. That one is good enough for today. This column wasn’t meant to turn out like this, but sometimes you don’t know what you want to say until you start writing.

I have a friend who says he realised when this pandemic started that he has been social distancing for years, he just didn’t know what it was called. I convinced myself for a while that I was an introvert. We have all told ourselves stories to get through it.

‘I’m enjoying being at home every evening. ‘The garden has never looked better’. ‘It’s so handy working from home’.

And these statements may all be true. Focusing on these things has probably helped us to deal with everything that has been thrown at us.

But it’s also OK to say that we miss the people we can’t see, the places we can’t go and the things we can’t do. And it’s equally OK if that makes us sad from time to time.

A stroke of genius...

I was sitting on the playing fields of Summerhill College for a while last weekend, waiting for a music class to finish, enjoying the sun. From that angle, the college is framed beautifully by Knocknarea on the left and Benbulben on the right. I thought about taking a photo, but the angles and distances involved meant that there was no way you would get the two mountains into the same shot.

It reminded me of a great photo that my parents have on their wall at home. It’s a panoramic shot, blown up to about 5ft by 1.5ft. The two aforementioned mountains take centre stage, but it’s only possible to get them into the same picture because the angle of the shot is different.

The picture was taken from somewhere near Ladies Brae, heading out towards West Sligo, and the skill of the photographer (Ciarán McHugh) in this instance was to take these unrelated landmarks and pick the right angle so that they became related, getting across a bigger idea in the final picture.

It’s entitled ‘Beaches and Mountains of Sligo’ and you can find it on the Panoramas Sligo page of Ciarán’s website – www.ciaranmchugh.com

 In a similar way, I read once that a characteristic of good writing is to take unrelated topics and pick the right angle so that they too become related, also getting across a bigger idea in the process.

But back to Summerhill for a moment. The sounds of the Sligo Academy of Music Jazz Orchestra began wafting towards me. They were practising outside, and as I sat in the sun, trying to put a name to the famous yet elusive big band tune I could hear, I was brought back to the second World War, and a scene from Pearl Harbor, the 2001 film set in that era.

In this scene, there was a jazz band playing similar music at a goodbye party for a group of soldiers before they headed off to war, and while it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to be happening at that time, I wondered how this music came to being kept alive here on the other side of the world 80 years later.

Because it’s amazing for our music scene. Not since the heyday of the Jazz Ladds have so many trumpets, trombones and saxophones been heard in this town, so huge credit is due to Niamh Crowley, Stan Burns, and the many other teachers who made this possible.

And then it struck me.

Irish teenagers in 2021 and 1940s big band music. Two seemingly unrelated concepts but someone somewhere in the Sligo Academy of Music picked this Jazz Orchestra angle so that they became related, getting across the bigger idea of these instruments becoming cool in the process.

Genius.