The Breaking Point

To live is to see breaking points everywhere:

the fragility of our bodies;

the tenuous barrier between tranquility and tears

the abrupt stop when a car recklessly turns the corner;

the pause when lungs exhaust their air;

the punctuation that appears in our sentences to prevent them from running

…

and running

…

and running

…

and running

…

until the marathon in our minds says

NO

MORE

and our eyes glaze over with ennui and frustration and everything in between and we can only wish for there

to

be

a

BREAK.

Although breaks are everywhere, I struggled with them first in music. Whether playing the music of Bach or Shostakovich (and don’t even get me started on John Cage¹), we were always told,

Feel the rest.

The silence is just as important as the notes.

The silence could be a hiccup, a gasp, a breath held in prolonged anticipation. Without such breaks, music may as well be white noise. Breaks transition us from one phrase to the next, through one phase to another: broken fragments, broken words carry a beauty unreachable by infinite continuity. But I would always rush through them, eager to move on, too bored to wait.

There is something thrilling in incessant motion that pushes past the breaking point, whether it be physically or emotionally. But in a time when the music of my life has been left on repeat, with each rendition increasingly meaningless, it feels as if I’m playing a piece that my fingers learned too well and my mind forgot. Daily life is a song that has lost its meaning, but which I cling to because I know it: it is stable. Each repeat only makes it more difficult to move on, more challenging to break away to start anew rather than start another.

With only myself (and occasionally some research excitement or the weather) injecting randomness into these repetitive days, I’ve tried to take the advice of my music teachers and endure the transitions from one thing to the next with purpose. To once again seek the pain and rewards of breaking away. And just like rediscovering an overplayed song, I have grown to appreciate the life I was rushing through a bit more, and have found new ways to listen to it².

After all, if my life is the song I must play, I mean to play it well.