Giving Positive Stories More Playtime

Let’s adjust our playlist, friends. We all know that positive things are going on all around us. Let’s seek for that instead of resorting to consuming so much entertainment that leads us to doubting humanity, losing hope, and fearing the worst. Goodness knows, we could all use a dose of a good ‘ole oldie tune these days.

I had an old radio that my step dad gave me growing up. When we talk about clock radios today we usually think about bluetooth or Alexa enabled devices that gradually light up to wake us up as if by a sunrise. This was not that kind of a radio. It a dial on one end to search through the FM and AM frequencies and a clock with the cool old black numbered faces that fall down as time passes.

I can still hear in my mind the sound that old contraption made when it powered into life each morning. Depending on how much or how well I slept the night before, that grinding of gears was sometimes a sound I dreaded. But on restful mornings I generally enjoyed it.

Full disclosure here, I also had a CD player and I upgraded that a couple of years later to an iPod, so I can claim to be totally old school, but I kept that radio as my alarm clock long after I had upgraded my technology. I think one of the reasons why I stuck with it so long is because of the radio station I tuned into each morning. FM 94.1.

FM 94.1 growing up was the local oldies station. I grew to love the upbeat sounds of the Beach Boys, Jackson Five, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. Looking back, I think I knew, even back then, that the songs I was listening to about uncomplicated love, flying away to distant locations, and how we can know that she’s the one were built around cliches and that they over simplified life. But now I’ve grown to appreciate certain aspects of those songs even more.

We get to choose what we listen to and watch on TV and we choose what news we consume. So much of the things that are vying for our attention with our free time are becoming darker, less kind, more ambiguous, and more hopeless. There are fewer and fewer places where we can find that light-hearted, hopeful messages. Let’s adjust our playlist, friends. We all know that positive things are going on all around us. Let’s seek for that instead of resorting to consuming so much entertainment that leads us to doubting humanity, losing hope, and fearing the worst. Goodness knows, we could all use a dose of a good ‘ole oldie tune these days.