Life, it seems, is full of paradoxes. Here are a few that I’ve struggled with over the years and that inform a lot of my creative philosophy.
The more you relax the faster you can play. Not that speed should be the goal. To gain more speed you have to find a way to relax both your hands/arms but more importantly your mind. I think the same is true for many activities, the harder you try to force something often the slower the action becomes. The mental stillness that comes with playing fast is fascinating to me. It’s as if time begins to slow. You can truly begin to hear and feel the space between the notes better informing musical choices about when to close that space down or keep it open.
I imagine this comes as interesting to me because this also applies to conversation. I spent decades of my life listening to the conversations around me and learning to enjoy the silence in between. I find myself later in life revisiting the silence and yearning for the attention span and slowness to life I once had prior to social media to just sit and enjoy without doom scrolling.
Similar to if you focus on the thing you’re trying to attain the harder it seems to get. You have to find a way to relax and not stress about finding the exact right path but rather trust that you’ve set yourself on a path that will lead you there. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life trying to force an outcome of certain aspects of my life only to get further from those goals the more I tried. Patience is a difficult virtue when you never thought you’d live to see the other side of your twenties much less your mid-forties. In some irony, I’m now forced to be patient because I cannot and will not submit to burnout again.
The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. Some paradoxes are frustrating logically but this one I quite enjoy simply because it informs my base level philosophy and the meaning behind my name, Keep Learning And Exploring. I realized many, many moons ago that there’s no possible way to learn everything, it’s difficult enough to learn everything about the topic of music or percussion because its history spans so many thousands of years.
There’s always something new to learn. I wonder what I will learn tomorrow.
