Benched Week 47: rhythm

There’s a simple pace to the year in a college town.  Inhale in September: students, traffic, activity, business, noise.  Exhale in May: stillness, quiet, and tranquility as the students go home.  Being married (33 years today!) to a middle-school teacher, I know the divided year well.  There’s the grind, then the unwind.

But there’s more than one way to slice a calendar.  I became freshly aware of that as I sat on a bench by the college library.

All around me were reminders of different rhythms.  The sounds: the songs of migratory birds, here for the summer; the rumble of brakes on 18-wheelers making regular north-south runs on Route 15; the peal of the bells in the chapel tower marking the quarter hour.



And the sights: the warm-weather flowers in the planter in front of me…



… contrasted to the permanent evergreens…



… and in the distance, the penitentiary where the counting of hours, days, weeks and years has a very different weight -- and wait.



My life is now divided into a two-beat syncopation of leaving and staying.  There’s a bit of the interplay of one of M. C. Escher’s tessellations at work: am I a studio artist who travels or a traveling artist who gets to go home sometimes?



But that’s too simple a division of life, just as this morning’s observations remind me. Overlaid on that upbeat-downbeat tempo are many smaller bits of time –- moments in which I try to create my own art.  And therein lies the dilemma.  How do I create in small windows of opportunity?

Here are two recent examples:



I began this nearly a month ago.  Despite my snippets of effort, it’s still unfinished.



This was completed in about an hour.

As I get older, I find I have less patience for the slower pieces.  I lose interest.  Is there such a thing as Late-Onset ADD?  If so, I may have it.  Though I admire artists who can devote months to exacting painting, I know I can’t.

So the trick – for all of us, I think – is to try to maximize the moments we have without being held hostage by them.  In the end, like a great jazz composition or a Bach fugue, there are layers of rhythms in our lives.  Sometimes we capitalize on the minutes available.  And sometimes, we let those minutes flow into seasons like notes in a larger composition. 

Finding the right tempo – that’s a good way to stay upbeat about my art.