With snow on the ground and nowhere to go, I flicked on Julie Andrews hosting the PBS New Year’s Vienna Philharmonic concert for Jan. 1, 1916. Excellent Strauss music, Vienna scenery, beautiful dancing, and shots of the Danube valley during the “On the Beautiful Danube” climax.
One of my daily certainties is that I know how to cheer up myself with my vast library of audio-, visual-, and aural-arts resources I’ve purposefully accumulated over the decades.
It has long been, of course, a truism that the Arts have, historically, raised people’s minds, feelings, and spirits. People who are currently depressed and down need only turn to the Arts and Nature for whatever pandemic healing they urgently and immediately need.
We are personally responsible for ‘medicating’ and ministering unto our own selves, restoring our idealism and heightened living. One has to personally ‘put back in’ when one has been depleted by whatever changes and losses. “A (wo)man can do all things if (s)he will.”–Alberti.
Nothing happens/no improvements happen without conscious choice and personal WILL. As Viktor Frankl and the Existentialists pointed out: we make our lives; we largely determine what responses we have to change, context, and life’s buffetings. Mind over matter, basically.
(An example of conscious choice and will to turn a boring school room into a concert hall with many more-than-willing ‘accomplices’)