The space between beats

As a child, I wanted to leave my heritage behind.

I wanted to sound different, belong more easily, be shaped by the country I lived in rather than the one that had shaped my parents. Like so many children, I learned to posture long before I learned to belong.

Now, whenever life grows loud, I find myself returning to it without ever making the decision.

Before I open my laptop, I light incense. The fragrance rises gently through the room as the first notes of a tabla meet the morning light spilling through the windows.

The first thing I notice isn't the music. It's my shoulders. Somewhere between the scent and the sound, they drop. The need to hold myself together loosens almost without asking permission. There is nothing to prove here. Nothing to perform. For a few quiet moments, being is enough.

It has always struck me as curious that music built on such intricate rhythms can create such profound stillness.

Perhaps stillness was never the absence of movement. Perhaps it is what happens when we stop trying to keep pace with everything around us and begin listening for the rhythm already within us.

Left to myself, I move too quickly. I mistake urgency for importance. I confuse where I am with how I am, allowing the pace of the world to become the pace within me. The music changes none of that.

The inbox remains full. The conversations still need to be had. The decisions are no easier than they were a few minutes before. What changes is the place from which I meet them.

We tend to think of memory as something stored in photographs, stories or places. Proust found it in the taste of a madeleine.

Perhaps memory also lives in our senses. In the scent of incense, the warmth of sunlight on a familiar wall, the rhythm of a tabla our bodies never truly forgot. As a child, those sounds reminded me of everything I wanted to escape. Today, they remind me of everything I never really lost.

The music fades, but the rhythm doesn't. It slips quietly into the conversations that follow, into the decisions that need making, into the ordinary moments that become a day.

Nothing ends, it simply ebbs and flows. And every so often, in the space between the beats, I remember the place from which I want to meet the day.