What is your metronome?
Although I enjoy inspirational spiritual reading, I am entertained by novels and I usually have at least one on my phone at any given time. Recently, I finished a book titled The Family by Naomi Krupitsky. It’s about an organized crime family and offers a good story. What impressed me about the book, however, was the author’s delightful writing style. She is one of those writers who paints pictures using her words and it feels effortless. One of the lines she wrote made me immediately say to myself, “I have to share this on Substack.
One of the women characters was musing about her children and the description said that her children were the metronome of her life. Isn’t that beautiful? Anyone who has studied music knows what a metronome does. It is set to the particular beat, fast or slow, that the composer intends the piece of music to be played. By making clicking sounds, the metronome helps to keep the musician on track with the proper beat of the music. This is especially useful for musicians who have difficulty holding a beat. So what does this mean for us?
I asked myself, “What is the metronome for my life?” “What is the undercurrent that keeps my life on track?” I invite you to ask the same question of yourself without judging the response. Be as honest as you can. What beats regularly in your life and keeps everything held together?
Another way to frame the question is “What is the most important thing to me? What underlies my decisions and choices in life?”
The next step is to ask if this is what I want to have as the metronome of my life? Just because there is something I have allowed to take on the position of metronome, doesn’t mean it has to stay this way. Perhaps you’ve allowed your work life to invade your space so you don’t have time for fun and adventure. Perhaps you’ve allowed alcohol or drugs to be your metronome. On the more positive side, perhaps yours is music or cooking or art of some type.
Whatever your metronome is, discovering where it is set could be a key to greater freedom and joy for you. If you don’t like your current setting, change it. If you like the setting, congratulate yourself and enjoy!
Setting my metronome on grace and ease,
Krysta
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Hi. I liked your post. As a professional musician since I was 10yrs old I'm familiar with metronomes. There's another style of metronome that doesn't make any sound. It has a blinking light to keep the player at the desired tempo. And of course in music studios we used headphones and a "click track" to keep everything together as a group. I liked your questions. I was giving it some thought and I realized that there was another question we can ask, maybe the most significant question of all: "Who is the composer?" The composer, as you know, writes the music, sets the tempo, chooses the instruments and many times ends up conducting the musical ensemble from the podium. It's one thing to become aware of the metronome in our lives and recognizing that we can set it and change it according to our will; it's quite another thing to confront the fact that WE ARE THE COMPOSER of our lives, to which we set metronomes at different tempos so we can follow the tempo, keep the group together, refine our presentation and hopefully achieve a rousing standing ovation at the end! I'm being funny, of course, but this opens up a whole other area of self-discovery, at least it has for me: I've been an accompanist and I've been a soloist, and either way I'm still the composer and the way my life will go, and the tempo I set my metronome to, originates with me.
Thanks for your great insights, Rhio. You are 100% correct and I love the analogy of being the Composer of our lives!