I don't remember a time when I didn't love the Beatles.
My father used to sing Beatles songs when I was little, and somehow that music became woven into the background of my childhood. By the time I was old enough to form musical opinions of my own, the Beatles weren't simply a band I liked. They were part of me.
When John Lennon died, I was devastated.
And somewhere along the way, as only a teenage girl can do with complete sincerity, I developed an extremely detailed life plan:
I was going to move to London.
And marry Julian Lennon.
Obviously.
Life, as it tends to do, had other ideas.
But the Beatles never really went away.
The Dream That Stayed
Years later, when Ed and I went to London on our honeymoon, Abbey Road was one of the places I had to see.
There was no question about it.
I had grown up thousands of miles away from the places where this music was made, and suddenly I was standing there. Abbey Road. London. The geography of something that had lived inside me since childhood had become real.
But Liverpool still waited.
And waited.
Until this year.
Oddly enough, the thing that finally got me there wasn't the Beatles at all.
It was Boy George.
How Boy George Sent Me to Liverpool Without Actually Going There
When I learned that Boy George was going to play King Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar at the London Palladium, that was pretty much it.
I was going.
Jesus Christ Superstar is another one of those pieces of music that has been part of my life forever, and the combination of it, London, and Boy George was apparently enough to make me stop talking about someday and start buying plane tickets.
Then Boy George pulled out of the production.
Which was inconvenient, considering I'd already planned a trip across the Atlantic around him. 😂
But the trip was happening.
And if I was going all the way to England, there was absolutely no chance I was going to be that close to Liverpool and not finally make the pilgrimage.
So Boy George accidentally got me to the Beatles.
Life is weird.
Walking Into the Music
Liverpool was everything I wanted it to be.
We visited the Liverpool Beatles Museum and took the Magical Mystery Tour. We went to Penny Lane and Strawberry Field. We stood inside the Cavern Club.
These weren't simply names anymore.
They were places.
And for someone who has loved this music for nearly her entire life, there was something surreal about walking through them.
But the experiences that affected me most weren't necessarily the famous ones.
They were the smaller places where the Beatles weren't yet the Beatles.
Before John Lennon Was John Lennon
Through the National Trust, we toured Mendips, John Lennon's childhood home.
That's what I kept thinking about while I was there: he was just a kid.
Before the records. Before Beatlemania. Before millions of people knew his name.
Just John.
We also toured 20 Forthlin Road, Paul McCartney's childhood home, another ordinary house that became part of an extraordinary story.
There is something about standing in places like that that collapses the distance between the person who became famous and the person who existed before any of it happened.
You can know intellectually that everyone begins somewhere.
Standing in the room where that beginning actually happened is different.
The Casbah
One of my favorite stops was the Casbah Coffee Club.
The club was opened by Mona Best—Pete Best's mother—in the basement of her Liverpool home in 1959. Before the Beatles existed under that name, the Quarrymen played there.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and others helped prepare and decorate the space.
And you can still see evidence of them there.
That may have been what struck me most throughout the entire trip.
All these things we now treat as history were once simply people doing things.
Painting a wall.
Playing music in a basement.
Writing songs.
Trying something.
Nobody standing there could possibly have known where any of it would lead.
Back to London
Eventually we returned to London, where Jesus Christ Superstar was still waiting for me—even without Boy George.
And Sam Ryder was incredible.
Truly.
So the show that originally inspired the entire trip still became one of its highlights, just not for the reason I'd expected.
Then, of course, I went back to Abbey Road.
Because some pilgrimages require repeat visits.
Strawberry Fields Forever
There was another reason this trip felt especially meaningful to me now.
My own book is called Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed.
The title comes from a line in “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a song I've known for most of my life.
The book itself has nothing to do with the Beatles. It's about meditation—specifically, finding ways to meditate when visualization doesn't work for you. I have aphantasia, which means I can't voluntarily create pictures in my mind, and I wrote the kind of meditation book I once needed myself.
But when it came time to name it, those words that had been sitting inside me since childhood suddenly belonged somewhere new.
Living is easy with eyes closed.
And now I was standing at Strawberry Field.
I couldn't have imagined that moment as a child.
Quite literally, as it turns out. 😂
But I could live it.
Where Inspiration Leads
I think that's what stayed with me after this trip.
We never really know where the things we love are going to lead us.
A song your father sings when you're little can become a lifelong love of a band.
A teenage fantasy about moving to London can eventually become a honeymoon there.
A Boy George performance you never actually see can send you to Liverpool.
A Beatles lyric can sit quietly in your mind for decades until one day it becomes the title of a book about meditation for people who can't make pictures in theirs.
And a group of young men playing music in basements and ordinary houses can create something people are still traveling across the world to experience more than half a century later.
Inspiration doesn't always move in straight lines.
Maybe that's part of the magic.
Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed
Andrea Thorfinson's Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed is a practical guide to meditation for people who struggle with visualization, including those with aphantasia and ADHD. Rather than relying on mental imagery, the practices use breath, sound, movement, touch and other accessible anchors.
Explore Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed from Genius Books.
Also available in Spanish.