Click - Click

A few months ago my 9 year-old grandson found the buttons on my digital keyboard that unleashed the canned rhythm. Out came the rock beat, complete with drums, bass and rhythm guitar.
      Oh, he also found the volume control too, how it could get really loud.
      Immediately the intrusive beat got the rest of us to pay attention. The smile on my grandson’s face beamed.
      And with it all, I felt betrayed.
      Not by my grandson, no. He was just doing what a normal 9 year-old boy would do, and delighting in doing it. I am glad he felt confident enough to play around with the keyboard in his grandparents’ home. I felt betrayed by my keyboard. All of the reflective jazz, with the thick harmonies and syncopated riffs, were long gone. Out came an unrelenting rhythm as if my living room had become a night club.
      To confess, years ago I played around with those rhythm buttons, never really got the hang of it. The pseudo-music coming from them pulls a person into its beat, doesn’t let go. My melodies stumbled around in there with the canned rhythm, collided with it rather than colluded with the beat.
      My digital piano also has a built-in metronome. Repeatedly over the years I have tried to play to it, eventually giving up in frustration. Perhaps it’s a trauma thing. I used to have to use the swinging pendulum metronome for my practicing of scales and songs when I did my Grade Eight Conservatory exam as a teenager.
      All this gives me cause to reflect on a piano-playing entertainer who provides live music at the coffeeshop where I play on Saturdays. He is really good at using the canned rhythm-maker on his keyboard. Out comes the classic rock songs, with their classic rock beats, while he sings along in a suitably gravelly voice. Folk really like hearing those old songs. He performs really well.
      We all have grown up as listeners to 20th Century music - pop, rock, country - saturated with the invariant beat as audio technology has infused musical performance. Band leaders and orchestra conductors have given way to click tracks (a metallic, metronomic beat that musicians are expected to play to). In popular music, musicians don’t look to a leader or listen to companion musicians to stay together, navigating feeling and meaning within the music. No, they match their playing to a click-click-click-click in their ear.
      But my heart doesn’t beat an unvarying rhythm, neither is my cycle of breath. The natural rhythms of my body rise and fall with my subjective experience of what is going on around me - not click-tracked at all. 

Regular readers of my blog will probably be expecting that other shoe to drop, the one about my years of being a psychologist. Let me start this next part with a story or two.
      I remember hearing of a psychologist who utilized standard treatment protocols for different mental health disorders. If you suffered with anxiety and were on session six with her you would be getting the canned sixth session treatment content. In ten sessions she would be done with you.
      Protocol driven therapies became quite the thing over the course of my career. We all attended workshops to learn the content for each step in sequence of a particular therapy. I once bought a three-inch binder to house the worksheets for one of them. It languished in a bottom drawer of a file cabinet until I finally got rid of it when I retired. During another therapy-protocol weekend training I was shocked to hear the presenter issue a warning: at a particularly critical juncture in the process we were not to stray from her exact wording, reading it from the manual if need be. Yes, we were to take our eyes off our client to insure we were using the innovator’s exact words.
      Prescribed steps in a protocol are the click-track psychotherapy is to follow.
      But I didn’t want my interaction with my clients to be manualized by some distant researcher/innovator who reduced the human condition to symptoms and diagnoses. I didn’t want what I did with my clients to be as if I was acting on objects rather than relating to a person with a unique subjectivity.
      I didn’t want to be guided by the unrelenting beat of goal planning, steps accomplishing, emotion managing, rights asserting, adversity coping and outcome succeeding that our culture prescribes as a root of wellbeing.
      I wanted to find nuance within the life story of my clients, places where my breathing might quicken in anticipation, or my heart slow in gentle reflection. I wanted to see them emerge into a unique version of themselves that would be fulfilling and sustainable. Unpredicted, unpredictable yet apt.
      I wanted it to be human.
      I guess there is an expression for people like me … it goes something like he marches to a different drummer. But that one doesn’t even fit. I just refuse drummers and marching entirely.
​
Oh, it happened again.
      You might remember something I described in last month’s blog, Well, a couple of weeks ago there was yet another little girl at the coffeeshop. She was filled with graceful movement as she listened to my music while eating her ice cream cone. She then was confident enough to come over the piano and plunk away, eventually to dance to the music while I played. I tried to keep my beat as steady as I could. But what was particularly artful was her adapting the practiced moves from dance class to any irregularities that came in my rhythm. She had probably only danced to click-tracked music with its regular beat but she managed to be with me.
      It wasn’t perfect. It was companionable. It was human.

Clickable links to previous blogs

May 2024 - In the zone
April 2024 - How creativity happens ... well, for me anyway
March 2024 - Your bridge to cross
February 2024 - A little Deeper into the human condition
January 2024 - On Darkness
​December 2023 - Note Perfect ... or not!
November 2023 - Just noteswww.twiltondale.ca/blog/archives/04-2024
October 2023 - About endings
​September 2023 - Sacred ground
​August 2023 - Are we there yet? 
​July 2023 - How smart is SMART? 
June 2023 - Only half there
May 2023 - Who gets to write the story?
April 2023 - Intersubjectivity. Hunh?
​​March 2023 - A disturbing trend 
February 2023 - About being in the middle
January 2023 - Can we have a little heart here please?
December 2022 - A story about story
November 2022 - Facing One's Fears
October 2022 - Transitional folk
September 2022 - Transitions
​August 2022 —At the other end of life's journey
July 2022—The problem with what emerges.
June 2022 — So who am I doing this for anyway?
May 2022 - Wait for it ... wait ... 
April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi.
March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone.
February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes. 
January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book.
December 2021 — About time and being human.
November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery
October 2021 — Flow versus focus. 
​September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth. ​