Mindfulness in Motion
It happened again.
About once a month, the brilliant (and free!) mindfulness meditation app HealthyMinds asks me how I’m doing with my practice (they offer self-guided ‘learning’ and ‘practice’ modules on Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose).
A year in, I’m feeling improvement across most of their survey metrics (Guiding sense of purpose? Almost always. Confidence that most people are doing the best they can? Again, often, etc.) But there’s one benchmark that I honestly cannot budge: “In the past month, how often did you feel overwhelmed by your responsibilities, so that you felt you could never meet them all?”
Answer: Often. (More like, nearly always.)
“Why is that?” I ask myself, especially if I’m lying in the dark, finishing my practice before falling asleep. Do I still take on too many things, so that no reasonable person could expect to perform them well? Or—more menacing—do I take on too many things so that I always have “busyness“ as an excuse not to focus or perform my honest best? Or, am I putting way too much emphasis on “doing” as a measure of worth? Probably all of the above, I’ll admit.
Then last week, while I was watching my stand partner in community band play a concert A into a digital tuning app on her cell phone, I hit on a metaphor that brought me a wave of relief. Let me explain.
Tuning any given note to its truest sound, what we recognize as being “in tune,” not “sharp” or “flat,” is—I realize—more about the proverbial journey than the destination. Whether you’re producing a note with your voice or through an instrument, time spent at the “center” of the pitch—the sweet spot for its acoustic wavelength and frequency—is fleeting. You can hover close, just a few cents sharp or flat, close enough that only those with innate “perfect pitch” could detect the deviation, but it’s impossible (I think) for the human breath to produce a sound perfectly, all the time, every time.
There’s just too much that influences the breath as it builds and fades, as the lungs empty: how tightly your embouchure arrived at that note, from those that came before it or that will come after it; how fatigued you might be with controlling the breath, late in the day or long into a sustained phrase; or even how warm the air is in the room (heat = tendency to play sharp). In other words, the work is always in seeking the center, forward and back, a balance of pressures and moving parts.
Musicans, then, are always listening for the center, adjusting their pitch toward that ideal, but knowing full well they can’t live there.
Of course.
Then, maybe what I’ve been calling “overwhelm” isn’t so heavy a burden, or even a burden at all. Maybe it’s an essential tool I carry to remind myself that I can’t live in the chaos of “more” or the false salvation of “less.” I might actually need an awareness of “overwhelm” to seek the center and trust that it’s there, and know that when I hit it, even for a moment, it will ring—I will ring—clear and true.