I recently had a few hours to myself one evening. The boys were up to their own devices and so I had the privilege of spending the rare leisure time how I wanted. I ended up watching a Netflix documentary called “Count Me In.” It focused on drummers from different famous bands talking about their craft, how they came to it and the human connection music provides for them and their audiences. At one point, things got a little technical and one of the interviewees mentioned grace notes.
For those unfamiliar, grace notes are embellishment notes that are annotated above the line of music. They are there simply to add interest to the music without interrupting the rhythm and the final destination that the music is headed toward. Grace notes can be sung or played and sometimes, as with drumming, simply a way to help mark the music. They don’t significantly change anything but add a little flourish so that things don’t become too monotonous.
So of course, the idea of grace notes stuck with me and percolated while I washed dishes and took my shower. How do grace notes materialize in our lives? Or rather, can we use the concept to illustrate the significance of our lives in some way?
Our lives have a rhythm of their own. We mark the passage of time, like today, with the new year. We have milestones and goals we like to meet. Our days take on the brush-teeth-eat-breakfast type of thrum. For the most part, even when no day is the same, every day is the same. It is truly the grace notes - the conversations we have, the funny thing that happened, the bit of gossip or a thought we had - that make life interesting. And so I’ve decided that this year with its oodles of time and time not enough, would be ideal to start capturing some of these grace notes. Mostly, they might be thoughts I have or questions that I’m working through. I hope to use it as an exercise to help me write, but also to help us all think a little deeper. When everyday becomes the same, we start missing the embellishments that make our lives interesting. Like I said, I have the time now, even though, I really don’t.
I’ll capture the grace notes as often as I can in a separate section here. I hope you’ll read. And perhaps you might try to write your own.
In the meantime, this quote spoke to me the other day and I think it perfectly sums up this idea:
“To be a good storyteller, one must be gloriously alive. It is not possible to kindle fresh fires from burned-out embers. The best of the traditional storytellers are those who live close to the heart of things0to the earth, sea, wind and weather. They have known solitude, silence. They have given unbroken time in which to feed deeply, to reach constantly for understanding.”
If you want to learn more about the Netflix documentary, you’ll find a trailer here.