Aligned & Awake: The New Kid At Forty-Six

How a room full of strangers turned into the best conversation I've had in years.

Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.

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There are still rooms where people sit together and properly listen: no phones lighting up every thirty seconds, no one talking over the music, no one reaching for the next song before the last one has finished introducing itself. Just a room full of strangers, a record spinning, and a silence that turns into conversation.

Over the past couple of evenings in London, I wandered into two listening sessions. Different artists, genres and people. One evening drifted through jazz, guitar solos, bossa nova and flamenco; the next stitched together Latin rhythms, hip hop, soul and blues until the songs felt less like categories and more like passports.

After each piece, the room talked about what it stirred up, what people heard, what surprised them.

I found myself sitting there thinking: when was the last time I listened to anything with this much attention?

Years ago I owned hundreds of CDs, shelves of them, cassettes before that. I happily disappeared down musical rabbit holes long before Spotify made it socially acceptable. Music has always been one of the great loves of my life.

Sitting in that room, I realized how little I actually know: how many extraordinary musicians I’ll probably never hear, how many stories are tucked inside songs I’ve never stumbled across. There’s something strangely comforting about that. The world is still bigger than my playlists.

Photo by John Matychuk on Unsplash

What struck me even more was the room itself: people of every age, from different countries and cultures, different lives, strangers who probably would never have crossed paths outside that space. Then someone pressed play, and for the next two hours, we all spoke the same language...art.

It made me laugh because I’ve somehow become the new kid at school again at forty-six. A sentence I never expected to write.

There’s a peculiar awkwardness to arriving somewhere new at this age. Everyone else seems to know each other already. I hovered near the biscuits for slightly longer than necessary, pretending to be deeply fascinated by the snack selection and debating whether four biscuits is too many to eat at once.

Eventually someone said hello. We talked about the music, then about books, then about life, and an hour later I’d forgotten I ever arrived alone.

Art removes the pressure to impress anyone. There’s no need to invent clever conversation. The painting starts it, or the film, or the song. I arrived with my own experience and left carrying a little of someone else’s.

As I walked home along the canal that evening, I kept thinking about my own work. The musicians weren’t trying to squeeze themselves into neat little boxes; they borrowed from everywhere: jazz wandering into flamenco, soul dancing with hip hop, Latin rhythms shaking hands with blues. Nobody seemed particularly concerned about what shelf the music belonged on. They were only trying to make people feel something.

It made me wonder if writers spend too much time worrying about genre — travel, memoir, history, personal essays, humour. Maybe those are only shelves in a bookshop, and on the page, they get to dance together.

London keeps handing me these tiny classrooms disguised as ordinary evenings. A Japanese film in a small cinema room. A painting revealing its truth without hurrying. A room full of strangers listening to songs all the way through.

Each one leaves me with the same feeling. I didn’t move to London only to write more stories. I moved here to become a better listener.

And that’s where every good story begins.

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Tell me…

When did you last listen to something all the way through, no skipping, phone or distractions?

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