Cultivating Our Ability to Feel: The Resonance of Music and Generosity

In his latest blog post, Baruch President S. David Wu writes about his love of music and how it connects to various parts of his life and values: “Our ability to feel is not just an accessory to our existence—it is the essence of it. It is the music within the music, the rhythm that connects the notes into a holistic narrative.”

As I sit to collect my thoughts, a Bach partita plays quietly in the background—a gentle reminder of the melody that has always lingered in the milieu of my life. Music, in all its ineffable power, often transports me to the realms of memories and gratitude. My earliest recollections are draped in the soothing sounds of classical music and the disciplined rhythms of piano lessons, which were a staple of my childhood. Despite my begrudging attempts at daily practice, melodies echoed throughout the small apartment where I grew up, and at times, I can still feel the warm amber light emitting from the lamp sitting atop the upright piano. I realize now that these were not merely lessons in music but rather lessons in life imparted by my parents, whose love for the harmonious was only matched by their love for their children. They expected each of us to enrich our lives through the gift of music.

The Legacy of Gratitude and Generosity

Living most of my adult life at a great distance from my parents, marked by sporadic visits, was a bittersweet sonata of separation and reunion. My children, however, live a stone’s throw away, and our lives are interwoven with the regularity of daily interactions. I often muse that, in this way, my wife and I are much luckier than our parents were, and I am struck by the profound realization that our parents willingly embraced their solitude so we could savor the richness of our familial bonds. They sacrificed their presence in our lives to ensure the presence of opportunity in ours.

When you are imbued with a gratitude for life and to those who forfeited their dreams to build yours, you find within yourself an abundance of earnest generosity and an eagerness to pass on that legacy. This is the cycle of life—a testament to the enduring power of selfless love, a call that resonates through generations, a rhythm that beats at the core of our shared humanity.

Music, in its boundless grace, creates a sensation, a definition of space and time like no other. It was during a particularly grueling week, filled with the mental rigor of writing my blog on artificial intelligence (AI), that I found myself at Lincoln Center for a concert. Writing the blog had provoked a great deal of anxiety and uncertainty within me, and the anticipation of a concert lifted my spirits.

An Unexpected Realization

As I settled into the auditorium’s embrace, guest performers from the Taiwan Philharmonic joined the New York Philharmonic and began to play Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy. Perched on the stage forefront, the virtuoso violinist magically weaved nuanced notes with the accompanying melody. It was not just music: it was a narration of the deepest human emotions beautifully conveyed through the bow and strings. As the first movement unfolded, something within me shifted—a switch turned on, breaking a barrier and causing unbidden tears to stream down my face. It was an experience I had never previously encountered in a concert hall. Something profound in the notes and the way they were performed touched a chord within me, a resonance that was both mystifying and cathartic, and yet I could not immediately grasp why I had such a profound reaction.

Following that moment of overwhelming emotion, it dawned on me: we may not need to harbor such trepidations about AI after all. The essence of our humanity is our capacity to be moved by one another, a trait that no technological advancement can replicate or replace. The warmth of a tear shed in empathy, a lump in the throat stirred by beauty, the heart that swells with pride—these are uniquely human experiences that serve as hallmarks of our species.

Cultivate Our Ability to Feel

This revelation leads me to the central theme of my blog: the cultivation of our ability to feel, which is as imperative as the development of muscles for physical endurance. The strength of our emotions, the agility of our empathy, the resilience of our compassion—all are attributes that define and empower us to build connections that transcend the superficial layers of our existence.

Feeling is an art, a subtle skill that must be nurtured and honed. We often focus on building the tangible aspects of our being—the muscle, the bone, the sinew. Yet how often do we tend to our emotional strengths, those intangible fibers that hold the power to move and be moved? Cultivating the ability to feel deeply is akin to training for a marathon; it requires patience, endurance, and the willingness to push through discomfort to reach the depths of our emotional potential.

Recent neuroscience research has provided strong evidence that our emotions deeply influence our cognitive functions, such as attention and working memory, and that our feelings not only help our focus but also enhance our memory and decision-making. It is within this interplay that the value of nurturing our emotional acumen becomes clear. When we cultivate our emotional landscape with care and attention, we not only enhance our ability to connect and empathize, we also fortify our mental resilience against the ebb and flow of our daily lives. In other words, cultivating our emotional acuity is not an act of indulgence (as some may categorize it) but rather a critical and crucial exercise in shaping the very core of our human experience—ensuring that our emotional compass remains attuned and responsive to the world around us.

Emotional Generosity

In the narrative of AI, we grapple with the fear of obsolescence and the anxiety of irrelevance. Yet as I sat in that concert hall, enveloped by the haunting strains of Bruch’s composition, I was reminded that the core of our humanity is irreplaceable. The subtleties of expression, the nuances of a performance, the collective breath of an audience moved to silence or applause—these are the moments AI cannot replicate. They are the domain of the human heart.

A profound peace settled over me as the final note of Scottish Fantasy reverberated through the hall. In that moment, I realized that our ability to feel is not just an accessory to our existence—it is the essence of it. It is the music within the music, the rhythm that connects the notes into a holistic narrative.

Walking out of the masterfully renovated David Geffen Hall, I felt the resonance of the music continue to echo throughout the chamber and an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the enduring gift bestowed on me by my late parents. It is a harmonious blend of generosity, empathy, and understanding that reverberates and extends into the cadence of my existence. It is in the cultivation of our capacity to feel that we honor the sacrifices of those who came before us and find room for those who follow.

In the cycle of giving and receiving, let us strive to be as generous with our hearts as we are with our wants. For in the end, it is not the wealth of our possessions but the depth of our emotions that enriches our existence and creates the humanity that binds us all.