Find The Silence Between The Notes

Hey, let's talk presence. You know, if we were more present with ourselves and if we could stop the noise, we would probably catch a glimpse of what it is that we're truly capable of as human beings. But sometimes it's painful, right? It's painful to sit in the silence, even when the silence is often what you need the most. So how do you train yourself to be more present? Well, here's my best tip for you. I want you to try this out. Go put on a song, preferably a song that's very instrumental without a lot of lyrics, and listen to that song intently. And what you want to listen for and try to identify is the silence between the notes. The silence between the notes. Try this one time per day for the next three to seven days. And when you listen for that silence between the notes, you're forced to be fully present. It's a little bit difficult to describe, but you'll understand if you just try it. There's no other option but to be present. If you truly want to find the silence between the notes. And then take that same skill that you develop over the next three to seven days and apply that to everything else that you want to be present for. Every conversation, every song, every bite of food, every sip of a drink, every drop of paint on a canvas of art that you're looking at, every hug, every kiss, every act of lovemaking, every word you hear, be intentional about it. It's happening all around you, this silence between the notes. But you must pay attention. If you do, you'll find that this full act of presence is when all the things jumbling around in your orchestral supercomputer subconscious become the conscious. You're actually able to pay attention to them. But it takes a hell of a lot of patience and presence and trust and practice to take the time to stop and listen. And music, I've found, is how you can train yourself to find the silent spaces between the notes, to be able to gracefully shift from the subconscious to the conscious and back again, to surf subconsciously to conscious to subconscious by listening to the space between the notes. If you really can't be fully present, then that means perhaps you've lost trust that God's going to provide for you when you are fully present and not thinking constantly to the future and not constantly replaying the past. So listen to the space between the notes, and then trust God. And finally, it's important to realize that once you're able to find the silence between the notes, you don't necessarily have to be 100,000% tuned into one specific object all the time, right? From an evolutionary or an ancestral standpoint, you'd have died pretty early by being killed by a saber toothed tiger as you spent your entire morning staring deeply and smelling every flower in your path. That's not what I'm asking you to do. But for most people, being alert to danger or distracted by multiple objects isn't something they need to learn to do or something they're not doing enough of. Distraction is instead something we struggle with all the time. For most people, stopping to smell the flowers and listening for the silence between the notes is what needs to be learned and honed and practiced. This pays dividends in many areas of life, including your stress response, right? Once you're able to be present, you're able to know how your body is responding to stress. As Victor Frankel alludes to when he writes the following between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. I'm going to say it one more time and then I'm going to finish this video. Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. So go play a song and listen for the space between the notes.