The overlooked song principle

Just the other day, out of boredom I was listening to relatively old music albums in my list. You know, something we all do. We create these huge list of albums and then listen to our favourite ones time and again. Before you know it, you have a enormous playlist. The playlist is comprised of songs of particular genre you like, songs for different moods you are in, songs you have for special ocassions, some songs you have no idea how they got there and some that you have just lost interest in over time. It rarely happens that we like every song in a given album. But still we preserve all the songs in the album to maintain a collection. My process is no different. It just so happened this day that I veered from normal routine and I choose a song I never paid attention to from one of my favouite albums last year. I suppose the other songs were so well known I didn't think twice to listen to others on the list, or maybe I did but never liked it when I heard it after the popular ones. Maybe, at that time I just wasn't into these kind of songs. This was the 'overlooked song'. This time I tried it, and surprise!!! loved it even more than the popular ones I used to listen to. I liked it so much, it was on a continuous loop for a better part of the night.

It got me thinking, how much this applies even to other things in our life. A good example is the people in our lives. Just like different albums, we come across different kinds of people throught our lives at different stages of our lives. We have people from school, college, work, family, leisure activities etc. Just like with songs we have special criteria on which we make a playlist of people in our life. People we share common interests with, people we are attracted to, certain people that seem attractive at a particular stage in life, people we work with, etc. Consider your life to be giant playlist of people. Every environment (family, college, work) you encouter is an album. Every person in a given environment is then a song in that album. Based on our frame of mind, our moods, our needs, our thinking at the stage of life when we encounter that environment we selection of favorites. We select people that we think best suit us at that time. We area attracted to individual who we think would gel the best with us. It's like with a friendlist on a social networking site, a set of mobile phone contacts, a list of contacts on your chat list, a group of people you encounter frequently in either classes or work or day to day lives. Depending on our supposed preferences we have a mental check list and from each of the lists above only a few people ever make the grade. Just like with the songs that you loose interest in over time, there will be a list of people just present on many of the lists above withwhom we loose interest over time or they are just there and we never felt the need to interact even once after adding them. They will be just like the 'overlooked song' I came across accidentally. Just like the overlooked song they might turm out awesome too.

Its all good to have those favorites. But it never hurts to add to the list either. Just like with our taste in music, we usually change over time. People we overlooked in the past might be surprisingly fascinating if given a shot. Maybe they were already our type, but we never noticed. Just like with the overlooked song from my list, we could have another favorite on our people playlist.

So next time you are at work, go chat up the co-worker you just nodded greetings at in the past. Next time you are in class, go talk to the classmate whom you have shared many classes with but never talked too. Ping the person who has been on your chat list for years since you added them but never chatted with. You might be pleasantly surprised :) .