Finding myself in the night notes!

Every night, before the world fully falls silent, I engage in the one ritual that has become my true form of meditation: music. It’s where I unwind the day, rediscover myself, and let the noise of life fade into something softer and more genuine.

Music has become my medicine… the nightly dose that reminds me who I am and where I belong in a world that keeps shifting beneath my feet.

Last night, while listening to Olivia Dean’s “Float,” I wondered what it truly means to exist, to be present inside a world that’s constantly vanishing, even as we’re living in it. Her voice moved like light through water: “I just float, I don’t need to know where I’ll go.” And I believed her.

Maybe that’s the whole strange, beautiful task of being human: learning how to float through impermanence without demanding an explanation. To loosen our grip on certainty. To rest in the rhythm of things coming and going, rising and dissolving, without trying to wrestle them into permanence.

Every night, my mixed music playlist reminds me: we are born knowing nothing and then spend our lives pretending we know everything. We cling to meaning. We chase control. We forget that the real pulse of existence is motion… breath, tide, change. Floating isn’t surrender. Floating is trust. It’s letting yourself be carried by what already is; sometimes this can be easier said than done for me, yet I keep fumbling forward.

As Float faded, another song slipped in — Van Morrison’s Someone Like You.

The first few notes felt like an exhale after all that drifting. People often mistake it for a love song, and I often think of my husband while listening to this moody melody, but to me it also sounds like recognition. A quiet homecoming… a hymn to the self you’ve spent years trying to find in other people. “I’ve been searching a long time for someone exactly like you.”

Maybe he’s singing to a lover. But what if he’s singing to the one inside …the self who survived, who softened, who stayed? What if “someone like you” is really you, the version of yourself you finally see clearly, without condition or disguise?

That’s what it means to come alive, I believe. To stop auditioning for your own worth. To stop confusing love with external validation. To meet yourself in the mirror on an ordinary evening, music humming in the background, and whisper: there you are. These are the meditative moments that make me pause and smile while sipping my second glass of wine and enjoying whatever feeling the lyrics I am listening to evoke.

Night after night, this music teaches me that we don’t keep moving forward because life makes sense. We keep moving because somewhere deep inside, we’re still hoping to meet ourselves more fully. To see what love looks like when it’s unconditional, when it’s turned inward, tender, and true. So tonight, I let myself float again and let Van’s voice become prayer.

During those serene melodic moments, I realized maybe the true purpose of being human is this: to wander until you see your own reflection, to choose presence over perfection, and to love the person you’ve become enough to finally call her someone like you.