OFF BEAT

April 28th, 2021

The days that compose weeks and the weeks that compose months bare a strange similarity to music.  Songs are at once incredibly repetitive and also striving to delight with something new.  This is an odd challenge: how do you present something familiar while making it novel?  This is the task of artists of all kinds, musicians, even companies, programmers, writers and dare we mention politicians.  We are constantly trying to conserve the good of the past while introducing new material that might improve the future.  That’s what we’re constantly trying to do: to get the best of both worlds, those worlds being both the past and the imagined future.

On an individual level, we are living out a song composed by the beat of days.  All sorts of life events come along to disrupt that beat.  A good night of drinking with friends or a tough sleepless night attending to a new born - our beat is constantly experiencing the disruptions of life’s anomalies, and yet, it’s still bound to the rotation of light and dark, or communal sleep and waking, despite how much or little we get to take part in each.

We all go off beat from time to time, whether by design or by force of circumstance.  In a larger sense these departures texture the winding structure of our life, no matter how uncomfortable the experience is.  The departure casts out into a strange direction from which we have to find our way back, like an asymptote, always trying to arrive at the perfect day, that perfect beat.