In Appreciation…….. of the simple pleasures of life…

Zeena Singh For Eastern Mirror Sunday

Hello folks,

I believe that life has so much to give if only we cared to give a little thought to the most minuscule of joys (which we’d find so much of) only if we’d stop looking at the looming discomforts and discontents.
So here I am, to share with you the simplest joys in my life as I have experienced some time in my life and those that I take as I face each day, at a time.

Of Singing Songs once Sung

Last week I woke up with an unanticipated impulse to sing. Not just any song but curiously, one particular favourite of many, “How Great Thou art”. I needed a sing- along so I promptly turned to You Tube and chose Alan Jackson (unplugged), and together we let out a rendition full of heart and voice; (My heart and his voice).
It felt wonderfully fantastic. There was no stopping me here on, hymn followed hymn; – ‘In the Garden’, ‘ I Love to tell the Story’, ‘Precious Lord’, ‘Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus’,…..with each number I was getting transported back many years…..back to a time when a young mind absorbs and sops up, taking in almost every element and factor of an event. The event I’m talking about is the time my father spent in singing these very songs to us.
Not as a performer, but out of a passionate love for music and song, every so often, Dad would go to his library of hymnal collections, pick his all-time favourites and sing them, so that each tune has remained ingrained in the memory of the rest of the family. These songs and tunes became so much a part of our everyday lives that now I feel I can claim them to be my personal favourites too.
So fervent was his ardour, that let alone the favourites, he would even go after new songs, scanning and poring over music notations, to pick up the melodies with the harmony following after.
This is my exact initial simple initiation to harmonised singing and country, at its effortless best.
As soon as my little mind could have discernment, I think I could, in next to no time, feel the pulse of this zeal for songs and singing which definitely had started reflecting in each of us. My sisters towed the line and would be home every holiday richer each time with treasures of newly learnt songs and the icing on the cake being that each one of them were beautifully harmonised.
To put down the part of what at all times stirred up inside me particularly is that once more I’d give it my complete concentration – I’d take it all in, note by note, word by word. From listening spell bound, it turned to singing along and it stuck- both the music and the lyrics, never to be out of the system. Gospel and popular off the charts, though the specialisation was gospels it didn’t matter. I attracted them all. The best of Jim Reeves, David Cassidy, Ernie Ford and many I had no clue of then, became my genre.
Innumerable styles and tunes of equal, if not enhanced competence have stemmed since, but I’m appreciative of the fact that I think I can enjoy the best of both worlds even-handedly as I carry neither prejudice nor bias. Or do I not? What then is this happy nostalgia of songs once sung?
It is appreciation and thankfulness, suffused in gratefulness for this experience bearing such a positive lasting effect over me – one here to stay.
Feedback at zzeez_s@yahoo.com