Some never get to the point where they dare to discover themselves. If you are to achieve an abundance of joy and happiness, you will have to brave that introspective journey.
Who are you, really? When you subtract out all the cultural camouflage, what is left? Deep down inside, who are you?
There are many names for this self-essence: your spirit, your conscience, etc. Everyone has it, although each person is more or less aware of it. It is individual and unique to you.
One way of describing this entity or influence is as a song. It is easy not to notice it. The song is always going, but typically it is very quiet. Almost anything in life can drown it out, but if we learn to notice the music and pay attention to it, we can become adept at paying attention to it over whatever is going on around us.
We can be in situations where we are unaware of background noise. For instance, imagine sitting and talking in a kitchen, oblivious to the hum of the refrigerator. Until someone points it out, you may be unaware of what is actually a significant and constant sound.
This song is the song of your heart. If you follow its influence, it will lead you to greater joy and happiness. It will lead you to feeling integrated, honest, and stable. It will lead you to understand more about God and to act more like him, which makes you resilient to all the darkness you are and will be exposed to in this life.
Dancing to the music in your heart means being true to who you really are. It means externally acting, feeling, and believing in a way that aligns with how you are internally.
The Bible contains records of several occasions where King David danced. This wasn't merely a celebration. David knew the Lord's influence within him, and he was adept at tuning his whole being into that music. On one occasion:
14 ...David danced before the Lord with all his might...
16 And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal Saul’s daughter looked through a window, and saw king David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart. (2 Samuel 6)
Why did David dance?
David was a man who was accustomed to acting in ways that were true to himself even though they diverged from what was expected from him. He was a warrior when his brothers and father thought he should be a shepherd. He was a king when his government thought he should be a knight. He was mighty when the world considered him weak.
He lived according to who he knew he was even through stiff resistance from those around him. For example, in the previously-quoted story, when David was literally dancing to the music in his heart, his wife despised him for doing so.
Why was Michal so upset? Because she wanted him to be something other than what he was. She wanted him to be like she was, and was angry because his song was different than hers.
When you dance to the song in your heart, you will look like a fool to some. Others will resent you. Some will hate you. If you persist in dancing, some may even try to kill you. Why? Because your living according to God's song is living proof that they could do the same, but choose not to. You show them what is possible, and they will hate you for it.
Hearing and dancing to the music in your heart is not easy. It certainly isn't the default state. It isn't the most obvious path to joy in spite of being the only path to joy.
If you are going to dance to the music in your heart, you will have to do it in spite of the world. You are going to have to be willing to dance even when everyone around you wants you to sit down and shut up.
Life hits you right in the music. Life will always try to drown out your music. Life cuts the volume. It takes out the melody and leaves you with a lonely baseline.
Dancing to the music in your heart requires intentional effort. You have to fight back. When you encounter opposition, just keep dancing. Dance even harder.
You have to learn to listen to the music. You have to go out of your way to get to quiet places to hear it. Drown out the noise of everything else in this world, and dance to God’s song—his light—within you.
If you lose your friends, dance anyway. If your spouse resents you, dance anyway. If your work colleagues hate you, dance anyway. Dance in poverty and dance in plenty. Dance in sunshine and in rain. Dance with all your heart, even if no one else hears the music.
Some try to drown out the song inside them. They want to fit in and be like everybody else. They may be weary of the opposition from their friends, family, and coworkers.
There are situations and people that act as filters for the song of your heart. The song in your heart can be temporarily drowned out by busyness, social media, drugs, alcohol, or any number of other things.
Your song is the lifeline to the best you. Anything you do to oppose it will significantly affect who you are and lead you away from the degree of joy that could be yours.
You will never have peace, joy, or contentment while you are ignoring your song. No matter what you do, it will always whisper to you in the quiet moments: this is not right, you were meant for more than this, others need you. It will never cut you a break; it will never let you make excuses for yourself. It will point out your self-deceit and your rationalization.
Just as you can choose situations that attenuate the influence of your song, you can choose situations that amplify it.
When light interacts with light that has the same wavelength and phase (called coherent light), it amplifies in strength. This is how a laser works. Alternatively, light that interacts with light that has a different wavelength or phase is attenuated—the waves cancel each other out.
Find people and situations that add to and amplify the song in your heart, like a cellphone signal booster. Avoid people and situations that tune out, diminish, or obstruct the song in your heart.
Anyone can be happy on a sunny day. As you grow in strength, you will learn how to dance so consistently that you can even dance in the rain. Then you will see something magical happen: you will see that by embracing the light inside of you, you can amplify your internal song to the point where other people dance to it as well.
Through seeking and living by your song, you will increase its volume sufficiently so that you can broadcast it out into the world. Doing so doesn’t take fantastic or extreme actions. Though it might sound like a superpower, you can have this outsized effect on the world just by loving God and going about seeking to reflect his goodness in your daily life.
You step forward, regain your breath from the shock of greater realization of sorrow and evil, and then decide anew whether to do it again. Like an inchworm's next tiny lurch forward, your daily acts will amplify your song as you stare into the darkness and decide to take a single step forward in spite of it all.
It is one of the great contradictions of reality that everything good and grand in creation is the result of small, single steps into the darkness taken by otherwise normal people. It is a soul-crushing contradiction because of the implications for what you—normal, nothing-special you—have the power and duty to do.
There is a popular idea that when you die you experience a flashback of your life. This isn't exactly correct. Your situation will be much different than you may imagine it.
In this life, you have a fantastic ability to lie to yourself about why you do what you do and how you feel about it. There, you will know why you really did what you did, and why you didn't do what you didn't do.
You will have a complete, constant awareness of your life: everything you did and didn't do, freed from all the excuses and delusion you used to hide from the truth during your life. You will lack the ability to cover your failings, fears, unbelief, and selfishness with lies:
Wherefore, we shall have a perfect knowledge of all our guilt, and our uncleanness, and our nakedness.... (2 Nephi 9:14)
We will be stripped naked of our excuses, and we will see ourselves as we are seen by God: in truth.
In that day, we will feel joy to the extent that we reconciled ourselves to the song in our hearts, and indescribable pain and regret to the extent that we did not.
This life is the time we have been given to learn to listen to that song inside of us. This life is the time we have been given to live in a way that amplifies its volume.
You are not designed to be defined by your life. Don't let the world act on you—you act on the world. You are designed to define your life by following the music within you, the song of your heart.
Who you are, deep down inside, is not the rut of life that your environment has produced. It is what your song is. This is the light God has given you. It expands and develops as you heed it. Transform what is outside by listening to what is on the inside.
This life is the time we have been given to lose ourselves in dancing to the song of God's light. In doing so, you will find yourself in the person you become. Like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, become the reason you were born.