What Blues Teaches Us

Pain, Loss, Displacement, and Heartache

Pain is the great certainty in life.

Run from it, hide from it, avoid it at all costs; eventually, it will find you.

It consumes you. The colorless world is a pale reflection of what could have been, what should have happened. It is a cruel reminder that unrealized potential is sometimes the greatest heartbreak.

Pain does not let up. Your eyes hurt from crying. Your hands cradle your head as the tears stream down your face and onto the floor you haven’t vacuumed in days. You gaze around at a world you thought you knew, but can no longer see the same way you did before pain found you. It’s the worst pair of glasses you’ll ever own.

All love leads to pain. They are two sides of the same coin: love as the great incentive to take part in the joy of life, and pain as the undeniable reality of our mortality and limited ability to be here long-term with the people we care about.

Over the last few thousand years, humans have tried to explain, understand, and externalize the pain we feel. Whether it is in the form of myths, music, Greek Tragedy, philosophy, novels, songs, or poetry, we are all grasping at straws to diagnose and understand the crushing pain that comes to all of us one day or another. It comes when you least expect it, and like an evil flood, drowns even the smallest of happy thoughts or bright sides.

Human existence is never spared from pain. It’s part of being here. It is as necessary to life as love is. You just never know how much it hurts until you’re in it.

In moments of great despair and aimlessness, we turn to those aspects of our lives that give us solace. Sometimes it’s family, sometimes friends. Sometimes, it’s more self-destructive methods like drugs and alcohol to numb out and avoid having to feel it. I know that’s been the case for me in the past.

Yet perhaps the strongest, most effective way to understand and deal with pain is something I keep on my person at all times: a harmonica.

Playing blues has, for me, always been the best solution.

I was eleven years old when I first heard the blues. Alien, otherworldly, and rough, what captivated me most about hearing this music was not the technical aspect or even the voice singing; it was the honesty. The pain had nowhere else to go but out of the mouth of the singer or expressed in the fingers of the guitarist. If it lay dormant, it would destroy the person.

Pain has a way of acting like termite damage: you can ignore it all you want, but as soon as the floorboards have melted away and the house starts to shake, the whole structure comes down. In other words, the pain needs somewhere to go.

As I listened to more and more blues music, I realized that it is not just that we harbor pain as humans, but that we have the unique, almost magical power to transform it into something productive, real, and everlasting.

Blues teaches us that part of being on this big blue marble is dealing with loss; with heartbreak, breakups, poverty, addiction, and all manner of unpleasantries we encounter. The simple nature of the chords, I’ve found, makes it the most accessible and perhaps more egalitarian way of managing the inevitability of despair. The melodies are both universal and devastating. Blues encompasses the human experience better than any other music I’ve ever found because of its raw, unfiltered look at the fucked up nature of reality:

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

No one is coming to save you.

No one can take away the pain you feel.

But it can be channeled into something profound.

Blues is an individual act of creation. While the pain we feel as humans is ubiquitous, the way we express it is unique. Even blues, with its limited chordal structure, doesn’t seem to allow much room for interpretation. However, it is exactly this musical ease that lends itself to true expression.

The harder an art form becomes, the more thinking we must do. The worst thing you do when you think is lie. Blues has an inherent, tragic honesty that allows the player to tell the story of their pain with simple, concise musical language. The simplest things are often the hardest to say, and perhaps even more, the simple realities of life are the hardest to deal with.

Heartbreak, loss, fear, death: these are all tools we have in our arsenal to tell the stories we need to tell, to escape the monkey mind and perhaps find some measure of peace in the moments where we feel we’re at war with both ourselves and the world.

Blues expressed either on an instrument or vocally is a reminder to yourself that the pain you’re feeling is real. It’s not just in your head. For years, I’ve been a massive advocate of journaling. Seeing your thoughts externalized from your mind, scribbled out on the page, allows you to work through trauma, pain, and heartbreak in a more visceral and intelligent way. We are always in our heads. One of the ways pain maintains a hold on us is if we never allow it to get out.

It’s all energy, and it has to go somewhere, toward something.

It has to transform.

Vulnerability is the ultimate ornament for a blues player. The more honest you are about what you feel, the more it translates into the music. Blues is a genre of longing; of suffering, displacement, lost love, and broken hearts.

We must be embarrassingly human, unequivocally ourselves, and accept our pain not just for what it is, but what it teaches us so that we may move forward.

While blues is a music of wounds, it is also one of profound healing. There’s a reason that people say “sing the blues” when you’re sad: it’s because it allows us trudge on.

The more honest we are, the more we come to terms with suffering.

The cyclical nature of blues music has a hypnotic quality; going round and round on the same set of chords seemingly endlessly. Repetition is how we cope with tragedy. We tell ourselves stories over and over of how things should have happened; run through endless scenarios of lives that didn’t play out or hopes for futures we can’t have now. We cry repeatedly, expecting less pain. We ache and ache until, at a moment we least expect it, the pain we have sat with for so long changes shape. It becomes lighter, the weight ceasing to drag us down and instead being something we can look to with great fondness as a learning experience.

Pain needs somewhere to go. If it stays locked away, it will become your identity rather than an emotion. If it stays locked away, it will rip at the color and wonder of your daily life as you always try to justify your pain instead of externalizing it and understanding it.

I’m not going to say that it doesn’t suck. Life is fucking hard. Love is fucking hard. Being a human being is fucking hard. It’s not that we pursue happiness but that we can’t fully realize we have it if we’re blinded by our pain. Instead of being aware of the possibilities of life, our pain keeps us in a box that gets refilled year after year. Eventually, we might put the box away in a closet somewhere. But as the years go by, that box becomes heavier and heavier, the closet gets cluttered, and the psychological load overflows, spilling out and flooding what could have been a happy existence, drowning it in past memories, what-ifs, limitations, and pain.

Blues gives voice to the box. It’s not denying it exists: it’s giving it a simple musical form to be understood and worked out in. As humans, we don’t want to believe our pain is real until it’s too late.

Trauma is everywhere. Over 70% of people in the United States aged 1 to 44 have had at least one traumatic event in their lives. They account for 37 million emergency room visits each year.

See, we’re all fucked up. But we have a choice of how we respond, how we move on, and most importantly, how we choose to express our struggle.

Our lives are forged by pain. The best art comes from intense moments of unendurable suffering. Blues reminds us that suffering is a constant in our lives, but that doesn’t mean we have to focus on it constantly. We need to give a voice to our pain. It must leave the mind and exist in the material world. Only by confronting it, by playing it, by singing about it, can we begin to understand it. Understanding, empathy, and awareness are wonderful antidotes to the nihilism that usually accompanies our inherent human existence. As Viktor Frankl said:

“Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something.”

Pain is an opportunity. It might not seem like it in the moment (trust me, I know, and I empathize with you), but as time goes on and the picture becomes increasingly clear, you will start to see your suffering as something that, hopefully, changed your life for the better.

Open your box. Yes, it’s painful, and yes, you might not have the words for it yet. But I promise you, it gets easier. I promise you, there is so much beyond the box you haven’t looked in. There is so much more life to live beyond the crushing pain of unrealized potential.

Tragedy is the soundtrack of human life. Blues is the tool we have to hear it.

Go listen.

-Shane