Perfect Song

Time is water. We are the ripples. Each a tiny wave rising and falling through our days. The highs and low you experience create a cycle, which in turn build up the frequencies at which we resonate. Individually these things can all be mapped. Graphed along conflicting axis lines to create patterns that can be quantified and studied. Shapes so repetitive that it becomes relatively easy to predict their behavior.

Until they come into contact with something else.

Music is all about this contact. The distances between notes and the tensions that result when you play them together. Each combination a different waveform, colliding and reacting in space -- creating something new that propagates outward from a source in ever-widening arcs -- remaining in motion until acted upon by something else.

It all seems so simple when you read it in a book.

Lately I've been feeling like my whole world is out of phase. Like the combination of lost time and the distances (both figurative and literal) that have been created by it have put me in a place where I feel like I'm out of step with who and where I really want to be.

People see me. They can hear my voice. They can read my words. But at the same time I can't help but feel like I'm somehow separated from it all. Like everything's happening in front of me on some stage, or behind an electronic screen, with the words only coming through a tiny phone speaker held up against my ear.

Theory tells me that when something is out of phase, it means that the waveforms have shifted to the point where they start to cancel each other out. But I've seen enough in this world to know that we all to certain degrees exist in situations (whether they be emotional, financial, geographical or otherwise) that mathematically should be enough to shut us down -- yet we all still find ways to endure. To hope for more.

I think a lot of times that sense of perseverance comes from the connections we build.
The things we hold close, the people we cherish, even our confidence in our own abilities.

Perhaps that's why all of these perceived disconnections in my life lately have felt so frustrating. Because somewhere underneath it all is a sense of worry -- not so much that I've lost those connections in my life, or that the people and ideas that I cherish are sliding away from me and disappearing -- but more that somehow my own missteps have put me somehow out of step with the ways that these lines intersect and correspond with each other.

I don't know -- maybe none of this is making any sense at all.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes I feel isolated. Like I'm making music all by myself. Music that's worth hearing, but somehow is not reaching out anywhere beyond my own ears. Not just in the sense that there's no one around to listen, but that even when that opportunity arises -- the sound isn't completely coming out, or somewhere in-between the notes I'm playing and the sound you're hearing things are getting lost in translation.

But I promise you -- once I figure out how to play it the right way. Once you get a chance to hear it for real -- it's going to be worth it. Because it's an amazing song.

A perfect song.

[Listening to:  From Zero – "Free Without a Struggle" ]