Music, notes and lyrics, threads through all of our lives, and I’m willing to bet that we all have something like a playlist of our lives.

The songs change over the years, and through particular moments, but the music is always there. My coworkers laugh and will tell you they always know it’s me coming in to the office because I typically come in with music blaring from my cell phone as I enter the door. And it’s usually playing whatever song captures my mood in the moment.

And when there is a song that particularly resonates, it will be seeping from my car windows as I drive for several days in a row, and I’ll be singing, badly, one song coming to work and one going home, and they won’t be the same.

The songs have changed with the decades, and the styles have changed, but if I hear one of the old favorites from say, 1974, I’m going to throw myself into the song once again.

Or, in a few instances, I’m going to change the radio dial, because there are a few songs that will bring back memories I’d rather stay away from.

Music, with its beat, its rhythm and its tones, can move us without words, can lift us up into energy or can ease us down into a relaxed place. It can match our anger, our heat and it can thrill us in capturing new or lasting love.

Music pours over us like water, can seem to increase our pulse, can fill our heads and hearts and, when a good cry is absolutely necessary, can bring on the tears. And then it can wash us clean.

I well know the power of words, and when you combine that with the power of music, you can have an incredible tool.

I know there are a wide range of musical types, and what engages me may not engage someone else, but that’s OK. Music is personal. My hubs and I share six children, all adults now, but I can’t tell you the cacophony that sometimes rattled our house when everyone had their own music playing and it was all different. There was rap, there was what I can only call screaming, there was Broadway, there was pop, the list goes on.

You can believe there were times I wanted to cover my ears because it just was not my thing, but I didn’t ask them to change, because I understood viscerally that their music spoke to them the way the music I love speaks to me.

Phrases, bits and pieces of lyrics, run through my head through the days, and if I string them together, they tell a story of where I am in my life and in each moment.

It’s odd, I can have just a few words from a song play over and over in my head for hours, for some reason the words sticking like an ear worm, and I can’t explain why. Then something happens and it becomes clear what I was trying to tell myself. And once it does, those words are gone like a whisp of smoke and I’m on to new lyrics, another song.

I even dream in music, waking up with a particular song in my head nearly every day.

And yet, I am not musical. It’s a talent I would have loved to have, to be able to either sing or play an instrument. I took piano lessons for eight years, and though I could play, and with practice play well, I could never get the hang of reading music. And the only time you ever want to hear me sing is when you’ve had a few drinks or someone else is drowning me out. I’m just a hair shy of being on key, though I can hit a single note when I try.

No, the music for me is inside, running through me like a river, but I can’t express it myself. I’ve written lyrics and they’ve been put to music, but I can’t sing it for anyone.

But my kids are all musical in some sense. Our girls all have phenomenal signing voices, one sings in a choir in New York, both of our boys play instruments, one can play by ear just about any instrument he picks up. And my hubs actually wrote and recorded a song for me as a gift one year and I cherish it beyond reason. Winter Wood, he calls it, and it’s a gift beyond measure for me.

No, I have to be content singing when no one can hear, around the house when the hubs is beyond tolerant, or in the car, with the windows at least mostly closed, belting out lyrics and bouncing to the beat.

One thing I can do is dance. Fortunately, I have the ability to express the way the music makes me feel in movement, so I at least have that.

These days, an old song from Bonnie Tyler that has had some re-recordings with other artists has been my accompaniment. It speaks to romance but it also speaks to other emotions I’m feeling. “Holding out for a hero.”

“Where have all the good men gone, and where are all the gods? Where’s the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds? Isn’t there a white night upon a fiery steed? Late at night, I toss and I turn and I dream of what I need. I need a hero. I’m holding out for a hero til the end of the night.”

That song fills a number of spaces for me right now, but as noted, music is personal. Find your song, find your joy, find the music in your day. And let it play.

Elisabeth Strillacci covers crime, courts, Spencer, East Spencer and Kannapolis for the Salisbury Post.