Rhythm: Finding the Big and Small Beats
06.22.24 | 55418
For Reflection:
Rhythms involve periodic moments of stress to create interest. These moments, however, are not sustained. How do the moments of stress feel in your life’s rhythm right now?
What pieces of your regular rhythms feel most important to you? What practices define your life?
What values do these practices instill in you? How do these practices infuse your values into your personhood?
How has your life rhythm changed over time? What about your lifestyle has changed as you have aged, and how have those changes impacted the rhythms you create? Do you feel content with the rhythms you have now, or do you feel you have inherited them without considering them fully?
How might you adjust your daily habits and routines to allow for more balance in your rhythm?
Last week, I talked a bit about our summer plans and how they have been informing my perspective on rhythm. Specifically, I talked about how rhythm sometimes connotes something relatively consistent or predictable — but that, for me, the rhythm of this summer is much more dynamic. The symphony of my life, if you will, is defined by a melody that is constantly changing. And in that constant change, I am attempting to find a rhythm that keeps me grounded.
Big Beats
So I am looking for big beats - the moments where things come together, if only briefly. And I am looking for the instruments that keep the beat throughout the dynamic change - the instruments that keep me rooted.
As I write this, I am getting ready to fly from Chicago to Charleston to see Maggie Rogers on tour. It’s been a big week already between my work responsibilities and attempting to catch up with as many people as possible in the twin cities. But in the last week of travel, I have felt a few big beat moments:
in the car with my partner and our pup, driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway
hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains and seeing not one, not two, but five (!!) elk near our trail
on the floor in my parents’ guest room, chatting with my mama
meeting the gaze of a dear friend while walking up the steps of her porch in Minneapolis
with an old friend at a cocktail bar on a Tuesday, talking deep into the night about anything and everything
These are all moments in which I wanted time to slow down. But just like in music, things come together for only a moment before diverging again. In those moments, everyone breathes a sigh of relief — we have made it this far, and we are still here, together. And then, we continue on to the next moment, until we will come together once again.
Small, Steady Beats
You might be surprised how quickly in music you can lose track of your fellow musicians. Making music requires us to listen to each other, so we know when to come together. It also requires us to pay attention to the small, steady beats throughout, and to recognize that, because we don’t always have that steadiness inside ourselves, we need to find it in others.
I’m feeling those small, steady beats these days, too. I’m feeling their presence in the morning rhythms I have come to naturally follow: taking my time while making coffee, a gentle stretch, quiet time to myself for whatever I feel like doing that given day. I also feel their presence in the routines I have in caring for my dog, through meals, treats, and walks. And of course, I feel them in music. Because, if you haven’t been able to tell just yet, I love music. I’m someone who inevitably listens to tens of thousands of minutes of music each year and is somehow still flabbergasted by her Spotify wrapped. Music provides a consistency to my life and defines most waking minutes that I’m not interacting with other people. It grounds me.
Integrating Change into Our “Normal” Lives
In this summer of nearly constant travel and change, I am standing resolute in the idea that I can (and you can) choose to have travel be an integrated part of “normal” life, in which your routines, self care, and interaction with loved ones need not change entirely. In choosing to treat travel as either for work or for pleasure, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to experience a life defined both by steadiness and by change. We remove ourselves from the beauty that emerges when we continue being our normal selves - taking care of ourselves, maintaining our responsibilities to others, and considering the well-being of our future selves - while also experiencing the excitement and appreciation for the world around us that we often have while on vacation. We can learn from this presence in our everyday lives, and we can learn from our diligence in our traveling lives. We are not two different people - we are allowed to be the same person, going through change each and every day.
Your big and small beats are probably different than mine. But I encourage you to consider how those aspects of your life are present both when things are steady and when they are dynamic. Who are you when you take these two sides of yourself into equal account? What does the rhythm of that life look and feel and sound like? How does the music change?
Until next time, friends.
P.S. One more big beat moment to share: my friends and I got caught in a rain storm in Charleston and had the loveliest giggle fit afterward. This is going to be a core memory — I already know it.