But somewhere along the way, I forgot how to do it.

I think it started happening sometime after I started taking on a lot more responsibilities. I had become a homeowner for the first time and had a few projects done around the house here and there. A few years later, I was getting more and more involved in helping my mom take care of my dad. Then I became her full-time caregiver after we lost my dad and after her colon cancer diagnosis, which put increasing pressure on me to finally get my house put on the market so we didn't have two mortgages to pay.

SEE ALSO -->> Caregiver's Diary Part 28: Three Years Ago

Needless to say, a lot was going on - including many doctor appointments and sleepless nights, and "relaxing" honestly didn't fit into the equation, though it should have.

Recently, I had to deal with a situation I wasn't expecting after going to what I thought was going to be a routine dermatology appointment. While you can read the details here, the short version of the story is that an antibiotic I was put on after having a small benign cyst removed really did a number on me, as did the (relatively minor) procedure itself.

Though I'm mostly back to myself now, I went through a roller coaster of highs and lows and general sluggishness for roughly a week and a half, thanks in large part to the medication, and was feeling stressed out to the max over the fact that it had slowed me down and made me feel grumpy and non-functional.

Towards the end of the med cycle, I was sitting in my home office doing some administrative things when I decided to visit YouTube to find some songs by artists I liked, tunes that, in the past, when I knew how to relax, usually did the trick.

As I played the first one, I just closed my eyes for a few minutes and felt the stress slowly melt away. It was almost like magic. And I remembered as I found a few more songs to play that evening, that listening to music had always been one surefire way for me to destress, whether it was playing a cassette tape or CD in the car or house, or tuning the radio to my favorite stations.

The problem, as I figured out that evening, was that I had been so busy, so "go, go, go!" for the last few years that I pretty much stopped slowing down enough to really, truly enjoy the simple things in life, like smelling the roses, savoring a good steak, enjoying a smooth jazz tune, appreciating the feel of a cool spring breeze, being dazzled by the cardinals at our bird feeders.

Something else I remembered was how much my dad loved music, and how he'd often go into the study after he started dialysis treatments and would listen to some of his favorite CDs on the CD player we'd bought for him. Up until his last year with us, he was still asking for CDs for us to buy for him to listen to. 

His mood would always change after he'd been in the study for half an hour or so. My mom called it "soothing the savage beast" because that's what music did for Dad.

While I'm not a savage beast (thank goodness!) I still have my moments, and I'm so thankful that I've finally remembered the one thing above all else that has always calmed me in the middle of life's inevitable storms: music.