Last night we had a lovely dinner in a local restaurant. Soft, instrumental music was playing and it was a nice backdrop to our conversation. One piece of music was not really distinguishable from the rest until we got up to leave and were standing near the door for a moment. Within the blend of the medley, I heard notes that were instantly familiar, the tune of a song my father often used to sing, every word as clear in my mind as if my father was still singing it.

I am not sure why I had not thought about this habit of my Dad’s for many years. He was always singing and he alternated between songs of his younger years and songs in Yiddish. It’s a strange thing but I cannot, try as I might, remember his speaking voice. But I can hear him singing as if I’d just heard him yesterday and not decades ago.

My father did not sing for anyone else’s entertainment. He sang for himself and, I think now, as a way he could help to calm himself, to self soothe. Dad was a frustrated man in many ways. His career had not turned out to be all that he had hoped. While he had done well, he changed direction in his 50’s and never seemed to find his way after that. He was home with us from the time that I was 8, essentially (and unwillingly) retired, while Mom went back to work.

A perfectionist, a gifted man with no real outlet for his gifts, there was always a bit of caged lion about Dad. He wanted something more but couldn’t make it happen so he pushed my brother and me to live out his ambitions and he wrestled with depression.

Dad never recovered from the loss of his mother, when I was less than a year old. And losing his only sister to cancer a few years later created what I later recognized as a clinical depression. I always worried about Dad and I didn’t have the knowledge or the tools to help. I vividly remember talking with him on the phone when both my brother and I were in college. He sounded so low and so lost. I begged him to go to a program, to join a group, to get out and connect with other people. I wrote letters beseeching him to find some purpose. I would have approached it differently in today’s world but that was then and this is now.

As I reflected on the song going around in my head last night, I realized that all of us have ways in which we self soothe, whether we call them that or not. From the child who sucks their thumb to the adult who self medicates, we all have ways in which we try to make ourselves feel better, feel calmer, feel whole. Some of those ways are harmless and sporadic and others put us at the edge of a slippery slope, a slope that can lead us down a more difficult, and complicated, path.

As we look inside, as we work to grow as human beings, understanding how we manage our own emotions, and how we soothe ourselves matters. Are we, like my Dad, trying to sing our way out of a need that is greater than any song could ever be? Are we making choices that make us “feel better” for a moment but have larger and more far reaching consequences? Looking at ourselves with clarity and honesty is key to filling our full hearts.