So here is a question for you . . . are you in a hurry? Is your time always “short”? Are you one of those people who always says they need 27 hours in a day?
Time is, of course, a topic of great interest to me. A musical performer’s effectiveness, in terms of creating a sense of connection and emotional resonance, has little to do with how they look or their “tone” or volume, and far more to do with how they manage subtle shadings of time. And of course, comedy is all about timing. Thus, it is essential, for those modes of performance / communication at least, to have a good command of time.
“All God’s children got rhythm,” and you have all sorts of elements of rhythm going on in your body all the time . . . your heart beat, your breathing, your pace when you walk . . . But you also know that when you are nervous or scared, those rhythms change, usually going faster than they would if the fear was not present.
Did someone say we can make people move faster? Yikes. If someone is managing an assembly line, and it is discovered that introducing fear makes the workers in that line go a little faster, well, it would be silly for them not to introduce fear, right? This is the beginning of the subtle science of making people hurry up.
One obvious example: when you see a commercial for some otherwise useless product, it behooves that marketer to introduce some element of fear or anxiety to make you move a little faster, and dial that phone and order that talking bass or chia pet.
I will never forget one of the most important moments in my young artistic life, when I suddenly became conscious of just how many people had tried to alter my normal rhythm of existence. These efforts included timed tests in 2nd grade math class, plus the constant exhortations on advertisements to “Buy now!” or “Don’t wait!” . . . And of course the constant emphasis on gadgets that “save time,” which imply that you should always be “saving time,” i.e., going faster and more efficiently. There is tremendous shaming in our society of people who “go slow.”
As a young bass player, it was essential that I acquire total command of the pace at which I chose to play a given series of notes. But one day I realized that I did not “own” my internal rhythm. It was polluted with all these urgent fear-inducing messages to act quickly and not hesitate. And this fear could be heard in my playing, as emotions are expressed largely with time.
Re-acquring control of my pace was very hard, as it required my going “cold-turkey” off my addiction to hurrying. It was frightening and disorienting, and it made me feel disconnected from all my hurry-up friends (and society generally). When I slowed myself down, a lot of buried bad feelings I had been handling through distraction and avoidance were finally able to catch up with me. For a while I hated my musical work for making me go through that, now I realize it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. (By the way, when we talk about “arts education,” this is one of the great benefits of it.)
Altering pace or tempo, especially when you make it go faster, is a way of weakening people. It takes them out of their natural flow of synapses and thought processes. A manufactured sense of urgency is also a way to create a sense of importance where it would otherwise not exist.
Most of the ads we see contain a cumulative message/ cultural presumption, that to have any social standing at all, you must be constantly lagging behind and in a big hurry. Many people in management positions also feel it is their job to make everyone move faster they were moving yesterday.
You have, no doubt, met people constantly create a “shortage of time” in their lives and then bemoan their fate, seeking sympathy, as though they are victims of their popularity and demand. This artificial acceleration of time is an appealing, one might even say addictive, habit. Being in a hurry is also a great way to distract yourself from things that you don’t want to think about. When you cram stuff into your schedule, there is no “time,”i.e., opportunity, for you to de-numb yourself and feel things you would rather not feel.
So just curious, has anyone else out there had a day when they noticed an embedded “hurry up” energy and then sought to overcome it? I think many people use rituals like yoga or meditation to do this. For me, I needed some kind of cultural support to face all these demons of universal acceleration, and so I found it by worshiping “the music.” This grave responsibility of playing the notes deliberately, serving the intentions of some great long dead composer, gave me that alternative priority that allowed me to face and refute all that hurry-up energy.
I often encounter people, young people especially, whose internal clock is all jangly, and they cannot let time flow naturally. On the dance floor, they cannot tolerate a moment of nothingness, they are always eager to get on to the next thing, thus they have no rhythm. The pop music they hear all their lives does not allow for them to possibly have a moment where they can settle “into the moment.” Instead it always has this pounding pushing-forward narcissistic urgency, with precious little allowance for subtle nuance. They are essentially illiterate when it comes to the subtle language of time, thus they are robbed of connection, not only within themselves, but with others. The only emotion they really know is fear.
As I ponder my purpose in life, one thing I would love to share with the world is a reminder that you have an internal clock, and you have a right to tell all these hurry-up people, who actually create artificial time crises, to drop dead. They are fearful ignorant addicts, creating unnecessary stress. Whatever profit that was gained by all the hurrying is always eaten up down the line by stress-related health costs. They are harming everyone, including themselves and you. And by they way, this kind of thing also leads to lesser quality of manufactured goods, poorer customer service, tragic errors that lead to environmental disasters, and people being lousy musicians, comedians, and lovers.
© Justin Locke
