I have a list of songs on my phone. It goes back to September 2014 and is just a long list of titles with their artist next to them. I meant for it to be a prompt for when I couldn't think of what to listen to, but it has ended up being a map of the roller coaster past year and a half.

Music is the most powerful force I can think of both for discovering meaning in the mundane and for connecting human beings, much stronger than words alone and somehow both more commonplace and more gripping than other kinds of art.

I can't imagine how flat my life would be without music. The memory of driving into Dallas for a college visit to UD plays to the tune of "The Perfect Space" by The Avett Brothers and captures all the nervous desperation I felt about finding a place where I would fit.

My dad cooking spaghetti and trying in vain to sing along to the Italian lyrics of Andrea Bocelli's "Vivo Per Lei" finds seven-year-old me leaning against the refrigerator, giggling at his antics. My big brothers driving me home from ballet, the spontaneous and welcoming Friendsgiving thrown the night before all my college friends left for home in November, and playing volleyball with friends in between stressing about chemistry during one particularly grueling summer program.

Each of these plays with a powerful soundtrack that can transport me back to that moment like nothing else I've found. The songs themselves may be arbitrary, but they are absolutely key to understanding me.

Perhaps that is the real power of music: It peels back the cardboard cutouts we huddle behind and forces us all to be genuine versions of ourselves. Why else is it a bit of a commitment to let your friends scroll through your phone's music on late night trips to Whataburger? It encourages us to embrace that we sometimes listen to Miley Cyrus (but, like, her old stuff because "We Can't Stop" was a disaster and we do have standards).

Our music choices reveal how we color our time and what captivates the few cubic inches of freedom we call our minds. We hold songs in our hearts because they remind us, like the smell of honeysuckles or the heaviness of humidity, of happy times and beloved people, of experiences that forced us to grow, and of the real reasons for living.

Can you imagine the depth then of the human race? I alone have thousands of songs I cling to, each joined to a memory or feeling. If I extend that to just a small sample of the people around me, suddenly the world is colored with complexity. Someone danced to Ed Sheeran at their big sister's wedding. To someone else, the artist reminds them of a trip to England they took to escape some kind of pain. A third person has an even simpler association for Ed because their granddaughter is obsessed with him.

The whole world is walking around as if ordinary, when inside them they have life experiences, skills, and moments of joy and sadness and anger (hello, lessons from "Inside Out"). And beginning to understand other people starts with listening—first to their music, then to the stories and thoughts and dreams and fears that flood out of the songs and drift lazily away towards the bright blue sky.

"If I could fly then I would know what life looks like from up above and down below." –"Cecilia and the Satellite," Andrew McMahon