BEING OUT OF SYNCH

I sometimes wonder if those of us involved in high touch (rather than high tech) are a little out of synch with the times. Well I don’t wonder – I know I'm, at least, a little out of synch.

Then I remind myself of how a piano is tuned. In the middle register, each note actually has three strings - all three tuned roughly the same. But a good piano tuner will go back and slightly adjust them to be a little out of tune with each other.

Why?

It turns out that if you have an “A” vibrating at 440 cycles per second, and another string vibrating at 441 cycles per second, the sounds will cancel each other out once a second. This produces – get this! – a vibrato. The note’s volume swells and diminishes once a second giving rise to a much lovelier tone and greater warmth than 3 strings tuned exactly alike.

So it is with life and with being out of synch with the times. Perhaps you are the A – 441. You make the vibrato; you make the warm sound of the strings and the heart sing. Feel free to be yourself. You are not that different than anyone else - our physical structure, our human nature, the capacity for language, and creativity are things we largely share.

Yet, our difference is important because only you provide your precise vibration. Together our important differences make for existential vibrato – that makes the world a lovelier, warmer and more vibrant place.