June 28, 2026
“A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That’s how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.” – Dmitri Shostakovich
The change in tempo of a modern song can be either a jarring mess, or a beautiful orchestration of deliberate and transitional thought and emotion. When the beat slows down, we feel the tenderness or profundity of that numinous musical moment; when it pops into double time, we’re up out of chairs and dancing– unless the rhythm falls out of time, leaving us completely lost and confused, wondering “okay, when is the next song?”
The shift in tempo of that which we experience in our lives can be similar, albeit much heavier. For one thing, most of us listen to music for the pure enjoyment, the lightness of it; whereas our day-to-day life is often filled with obligations and responsibilities to which we attend, despite not really “grooving” to the idea of mowing the lawn or doing taxes. The average popular song today is also typically about 3-5 minutes long and can be shut off at the push of a button.
I’m sure that most of us have experienced moments when we wish we could just tap our thumb and skip to the next moment; yet they constantly zoom about us, as if we have 5 songs playing at the same time, with no off switch. What’s interesting is that, both in life and in music, slowing down the tempo appears to be a much greater challenge than speeding it up– it seems far easier to get swept into the current than to hang back and observe, listen.
Four Minute Mile
If you’ve ever taken an extremely part-time summer job (say, in high school); or registered for an unusually light course load for a semester in college; hell, if you’ve ever been in between jobs as an adult, then you’re probably familiar with this theoretical effect: when we don’t have a full-time schedule to adhere to, we tend to become disorganized and unproductive humans.
Now it seems obvious that if we’re not clocking in for the 9-5 every day, then we’re being substantially less productive (and less “organized”) than if we were at work; but that’s only if we measure productivity by earning income and acquiring personal assets.
There are countless ways in which we can be productive that don’t involve money (or at least striving for it): We could take up gardening, start a book club, volunteer at the local pet shelter, take up yoga, learn guitar, celebrate more meals, write poetry, walk with friends every day– if this sounds like a post-retirement plan, perhaps it’s because the elderly are doing all of the shit they wished they had time to do when they weren’t so busy careering (Personal health fuels personal wealth, not the other way around).
The reality is, we don’t commit to all of these things because they offer a much slower tempo than what we’re used to; so much to the point where, once the day is done or the weekend hits, it’s with the force of a brick wall, shutting us down in our frenzied rocket path. There also may exist an underlying fear that if we do slow down, or worse “enjoy” it, that we will become lazy and…you guessed it, unproductive. Regardless of how we may define productivity, this fear of personal destabilization could still manage to be a legitimate one.
Parkinson’s Law states that if we have less work to do and (therefore) more time on our hands, then procrastination replaces urgency and we are left with results of a lesser quality- than say, if we were to have plenty of work to do and only so much time in which to do it. There is, of course, a threshold to consider if we are to avoid project overload, burnout, or anxiety; but I think our collective “tolerance” within this barrier, is pushing its walls outward, as the rewiring of our sensibilities and the restructuring of lifestyles continues to pervade the temporal structure of our existence (all of which is designed to flow into the rhythmic, and monetary needs of the system).
This all depends on whether or not we are willing to “be our own boss” (I use scare quotes to emphasize that I’m not necessarily referring to the self-employed, but rather/also, the establishment-skeptical). The schools we attend, the companies we work for, they all tell us when and where to be; and the consequences of breaching our agreements with them range from embarrassment or shame, to financial burden or career assassination.
The contract we have inadvertently forged with ourselves, on the other hand, is unwritten; it transcends language or even symbols; it seems to survive on both pleasure and pain, desire and discomfort, and it announces no clear objective. This is why it’s easier to answer to an external entity, than to our own self; and it’s the reason why, when left to our own devices, we typically surrender to Parkinson’s Law of stagnance and apathy.
Sun Blocked
Ever notice how, when our time does open up we often feel like things are more chaotic than when we had (more or less) the same thing we needed to do everyday? Is this because our calendar is now more spacious, so we write some things in and color the white squares with a bit of busyness, unaware of how random appointments and BBQ’s actually do pop up out of nowhere when we don’t have our regular flow to net them?; or how vacations seem to have the opposite of their intended effect?
We don’t have to imagine the stress that comes with going on vacation after a grueling, months-long stretch of work, with virtually no down time. Our neurons are used to firing like crazy, which is more than enough to get us to our destination; but we become so caught up in following itinerary, keeping track of everyone’s luggage, and maximizing these 5 days of paradise that we’re afforded, and expected to enjoy, damn it.
The next thing we know, we’re taking work calls by the pool and flipping out at the boogie board stand because they don’t open until 10AM and “my son wants to boogie board now…damn it!”. “Well”, we think to ourselves, “at least I brought my golf clubs.” So we book a solo tee time, we get lost on the way to the course, we shoot a score of 109; our skin is blazed a nightmarish shade of crimson and our patience has become mythological, as we proceed to drink ourselves silly on daiquiris until we pass out in the hot tub like a peeling, sedated lizard.
When we haven’t given any attention to the practice of relaxation, we’re wasting our time in traveling to exotic places to try and figure out how to do it (unless it’s to a meditation retreat). We imagine that the swaying of palm trees and the distant crashing of ocean waves will permeate our system, biologically shifting our inner tempo to the beat of a steel drum; when, in reality, we haven’t taken so much as 5-minutes out of our daily meat-grinding lifestyle to bask in sunlight in the morning or walk barefoot upon the grass during lunch- which leaves us utterly ill-equipped to step into a slower lane of proverbial traffic.
Happiness is a PK
It’s equally as important to know how to utilize “down time” as it is to manage a full schedule; in fact, it’s arguably more important, considering how little time we may devote to actually practicing life at a slower tempo; not to mention the complications experienced when it comes to being our own “boss” (at least of our personal life).
Teachers receive a giant dose of this every summer, where the break is certainly well-deserved and much needed; but that massive transition leaves many, especially the younger educators, with the chasm of a question, “how to shut it off” unanswered until the point when August rolls right back around. The kid in us wants to fill the summer with fun in the sun, while the responsible adult in us is thinking about supplemental income and air-conditioning. Can’t it be both?
We’ve been watching a lot of the FIFA World Cup games lately, and it’s amazing how the athletes on the field can switch between offense and defense in the blink of an eye; but what’s more incredible is everything that is happening that the average viewer we doesn’t see: matchups, substitutions, fouls, schemes, developing plays, formations and styles and culture and history being shaped- which makes the games ever more exciting to watch (especially when your watch partner is a former collegiate soccer player). It takes practice breaking out of one zone in order to attend to the other; but slowing down the tempo won’t be any more useful than speeding it up if we fail to consider how much more is involved in the process, beyond the temporal.
If we think about music in the same way, there isn’t just fast or slow tempos to consider; there are layers of harmonic texture and color and melodic substance and direction that can captivate our senses, tapping into areas of our brain that produce feelings we didn’t know existed, leaving us spellbound, elated, or outright disjointed; and sometimes that beautiful beat in the background frighteningly seems to lose its grasp of time altogether, like walking on a tight rope, just before blooming into the next movement. Listening to the band Tool or the song, “Happiness is a Warm Gun” by the Beatles may serve as useful examples in this instance.
Many of the Grateful Dead’s deeper jams also visit this area, while guitarist Bob Weir even composed some of his early work using odd time signatures, such as 7/8 or 10/4 or 11/8 (as opposed to the conventional 4/4 beat pattern); and while this had its intended cryptic effect on the listener, even the late Weir himself (the man who may have played more live concerts than any other human) eventually “stopped playing the hard ones” long before he stopped playing music altogether.
So I guess if Shostakovich was right, then we really need to start practicing more than once a week in my garage.
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