The Question That Learned How to Travel

I was driving today, listening to an audiobook about music, when I had a startling realization:

I was learning.

I know. Revolutionary. But really, what in the actual heck?!??

The author had once formed thoughts inside their own brain. They turned those thoughts into words, shaped breath into sound, and recorded that sound somewhere far away from me. Much later, those invisible vibrations traveled through the speakers in my car, moved through the air, entered my ears, and somehow became meaning inside my mind.

I could not see the words. I could not touch them. But there they were, carving pathways of knowledge into my brain and leaving me slightly different than they found me.

We call this listening because it happens every day, but when you really stop to think about it, listening is completely bonkers. A private thought leaves one human being and enters another. Sound becomes understanding. Air becomes knowledge.

An idea learns how to travel.

And perhaps the strangest part is how inconspicuously it all happens. There is no dramatic flash when something new becomes part of us. A sentence lands. Another follows it. A concept circles back later and suddenly makes more sense. Little by little, our minds reshape themselves around ideas we did not possess before.

We are changed by things we cannot see.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that Music performs the same kind of invisible magic. A song is vibration moving through air. You cannot hold a melody in your hands. You cannot place a lyric on a scale and measure its weight. And yet a song can change the atmosphere in a room, pull a memory out of hiding, or make someone cry before they understand why.

Music can offer comfort, courage, release, recognition, or a feeling for which the listener did not yet have words. Songs are proof that what cannot be touched can still reshape a human life.

The more I thought about it, the more Love Each Other began to feel like proof.

My father, Doug Midgley, and his friend Bob Peek wrote the song in the 1990s. An idea existed inside them: perhaps we could all set aside our differences, look into the eyes of a stranger, and realize the world is full of friends.

They turned that idea into music. Decades later, it is traveling through me. I have sung it in my own voice and sent it moving outward again. The thought has traveled from their minds, through their breath, across time, beyond death, toward people they may never have imagined.

My father is no longer here, but an idea that once lived inside him is still moving through the air.

The song does not argue its case. It does not demand agreement or attempt to defeat anyone. It simply offers an invitation:

Love each other.

Perhaps that is part of music’s power. It can slip past the places where we brace ourselves for debate and create a different kind of space, one where people can feel something together before deciding what they think about it.

For a few minutes, strangers breathe in time with the same rhythm. The same words enter different ears. The same invisible vibrations move through entirely separate lives.

And maybe something shifts.

Perhaps only slightly. Perhaps in a way no one notices immediately. But learning happens that way, too: a word at a time, a thought at a time, a pathway at a time.

We often imagine transformation as something visible and dramatic. We look for the moment a person changes their mind, masters a skill, heals a wound, or becomes someone new. But maybe transformation is subtler than that. Maybe it begins with something invisible entering us and finding a place to land: a sentence, a melody, a question.

On this screen, the question my dad and Bob wrote is nothing more than a collection of squiggly little marks:

If we can love each other, why don’t we love each other?

If you listen to the song, either on my dad’s album On & On: Remastered or as my newest single, the same question reaches you as invisible vibrations moving through the air.

Either way, I invite you to let it land.

Not because a lyric can force anyone to change. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe the words pass through and disappear. But perhaps they linger. Perhaps they soften one edge, open one door, or slightly change the way you look into the eyes of the next stranger you meet.

Who knows what happens when an idea enters another person? That is the wonder of sending a song into the world. Once it leaves us, we cannot control what it becomes inside someone else.

We can only offer the vibration and ask the question. And now, this decades-old question has traveled from them, through me, to you:

If we can love each other, why don’t we love each other?

---

Let the Question Keep Traveling

Curious what happens when the question reaches you as music?

You can listen to the original recording by my dad, Doug Midgley, on On & On: Remastered, hear the version I have carried forward in my own voice, or step inside the Love Each Other Song World to explore the story and sounds surrounding it.

However you choose to receive it, I invite you to listen and notice what lands.

Listen to Doug Midgley’s original version

Listen to Allison2020’s version on Spotify or Apple Music

Enter the Love Each Other Song World