Time

My teacher has pointed out on more than one occasion that his best students have often been musicians. The obvious reason for this is that such students know what it means to practice. Learning to play a musical instrument well is probably the most difficult task a person can set themselves. It requires the humble taking of instruction along with tens of thousands of hours of solitary practice, and develops an intimacy with the learning process that few other endeavors will supply. However, I suspect the main reason is that when playing music you are actually working in real time which requires you to be able to feel, create, ride and slip time. You can only do this if your technique is so sound that you forget it – if you're worrying about the right notes or the correct phrasing then the music you're creating wont be buoyant. Riding time is not a matter of establishing a beat or a groove and then using that to thrust you forwards, but more to do with establishing a sustained and sustaining creative process by letting your energy out in a disciplined (playing the right notes) but abandoned (letting it fly) manner. You are doing two things at once – your fingers are involved in an immensely complicated and controlled sequence of movements and yet your spirit is riding high, intensely involved in the process of communication. Together these establish a space sufficiently attractive to seduce listeners in. Once this starts anything can happen – in the sense that what comes out of the occasion is not necessarily bound by the limitations of those involved. It's almost as though your expertise and training trap time, or distract it, so that your spirit can slip through it and start to operate outside of its boundaries. This is precisely what happens whenever you engage another entity. There is generally a structure to the exchange, whether the give and take of pushing hands or just the words of a conversation, but there is always something happening under, above and beyond this, energetically and spiritedly (spiritually), and it's these level that are important because they are not constrained by time – they don't stop when the exchange finishes. Softness is really just the ability to operate on these subliminal levels, outside of the hard spatial and temporal confines of the engagement. This is why a soft person (or animal – think of kittens or puppies), although often weak of energy, can be so effectively disarming and affecting – something about them slips through your defences and transforms.

I'm not saying that I believe musicians are generally superior people – I have known many and can safely say that they are not, they have been just as stiff and stale, just as locked into self-image as the average person. This is because their learning has often stopped – they continue to practice but only to maintain a level of proficiency (their self-image) which they acquired quite young, rather than to stretch their boundaries and break through their limitations: their technique becomes another acquisition (a hardening) rather than a liberation. It is important to take instruction long enough for your progress (destiny) to be assured, otherwise, spiritually at least, it's all a waste of time.