Escape to Headspace...

First published on November 2, 2016

This world does fill your head up, doesn't it?

So many of my coaching clients, at one time or another, speak about the need to get more headspace. They have a wide variety of tactics for doing this.

I can remember perhaps the first time that I actively sought to clear my head. I was about 20, lying in a small room in a very studenty flat on Pentonville Road. My head was full of worries and stress. I couldn't sleep, and it was late. Very late. I can't remember what I'd already tried, but sometime late at night I settled on first an album and then a book. They were a gateway to a simpler time of life, when the beginnings of adult worries were distant; when the stresses I had felt had seemed trivial.

That wasn't the last time I used that music or that author as a way to pull myself through difficult times. There are of course other techniques that I use sometimes. Chocolate, beer, TV and running are common ones. They work, too. But when the going is really tough, that band and that author are - for me - a much stronger tonic of headspace, of wellness. The music of Oasis just sounds like home to me. Those men and that songwriting has been with me since before I really knew what they were singing about, and the inspiration and depth of the words and the melodies still, so many hundreds of listens later, holds surprises. And the writing of David Gemmell, a British fantasy novelist who has been so much a part of life that I made a website about the philosophy which runs through his work, has the power to lift me out of the place I am and far away. To distract me, yes, but more than that. To relax me. And to inspire me.

These days it usually isn't that band and that writer. I find other bands and other authors (although usually guitar music and usually fantasy novelists) to help me when I need it. And they give me - to greater or lesser extent - what these artists gave me: not only a means of escape, as so much great art has the power to do. They do more than that. They teach me about my humanity. They grow my soul in moments of truth and beauty. Now that sounds like a way to get headspace. A great place to escape to.