Rhythm. What does rhythm mean to you ? 21st of April 2015

Present:  Otmar, Marjolein, Frédérique and Brad

As an ice-breaker I brought along a holography of a walking elephant. 

The remarkable thing about the postcard was and still is,…that if you move it or look at it from different angles it appears as though the elephant is walking. In big German letters it says : Geh deinen Weg ! Which means: Go your way ! I let all my guests look at the card for some time and reflect on what they saw…then we started with the association round:

We heard music, dance, salsa, percussion, rhythm that is in the air, spring winter summer autumn, rhythm without music, trill, sound, rhythm in nature, repeating beat…and came close to a definition:

Rhythm is any recurring motion, symmetry…

this can be in nature or in man/woman made strong or weak elements, or it can be opposite or different conditions…it is a periodicity of frequencies…and the interesting thing about it is….the TIME aspect. As the topic itself came forth from our previous meeting with “TIME” as topic,…here we were back at the correlation of Rhythm and Time. Rhythm aspects can pronounce themselves in Microseconds OR: millions of years. This brings our human nature

into relative perspective which to me is sometimes extremely helpful to understand its ways.

In linguistic terms there are some interesting aspects too: some languages ( Spanish) have a stress on equal times on each syllables and others (English) on equal time lags between stressed syllables. So in short: different languages have different beats and rhythms…

Our heart beats 

at a certain rhythm and we heard about the limits of unhealthy and healthy beats per minute…When is it risky ? What can we feel about it and also interesting …What can we consciously do about it ? What can we control about our own heart beat ? Can we influence our own rhythm ? Someone mentioned that we are sometimes synchronized with the outside world. When that happens we do experience a series of coincidences that appear to be very charming, funny or maybe even a gift to some believers. Sometimes we can also feel that we have the wrong rhythm and we are somehow desperate for the right rhythm. We can drift apart rhythm wise or as someone put it beautifully: we can connect, become a union, bring each other together, come into contact and we can learn to participate in a game…whatever that game may be. Stress can heavily influence the rhythm of our heart. It can beat faster and uncontrolled because of hormones that pour into our blood stream for whatever mind/heart reason. On the other hand we heard about the interesting aspect of influencing one’s own subconscious clock. One guest tells himself before going to sleep to wake up at 6:36 a.m. in the morning and he does wake up at this exact moment in time. In how far is our rhythm determined then by our waking control system and in how far is our system controlled by other forces ?

In nature we see a certain connection of animals with the right rhythm translated in the fleeing behaviour for example at the tsunami some years ago. Animals had long fled the coast and left for higher ground before the waters streamed in with its destructive force. Instinctively animals could sense there was danger because of a different pulse or rhythm in the earth vibration. Then came the question: Are animals synchronized to mother nature at a better level ?

In music instrument world we also heard about an interesting phenomena: Lang Lang plays the piano at perfection yet there is difference with the rhythm that a computer plays the same rhythm.  In music,…some people have more feeling for rhythm than others. We can observe people dancing Salsa and if we hear the music we can see dancers and those who really feel the rhythm. How come ? Do we need some kind of a liberation 

                                     

for the right rhythm ? If two people have the right rhythm they are great together and that is easily to see in dance. In other disciplines music is seen as a distraction to the mind. Brad tells us a little about his insights of Buddhism. Music is there seen as unbalancing.

The question arose: Is there a RIGHT RHYTHM? And if so: What is it ? We heard about the connection between HUMAN & NATURE…if those two are properly connected we are in the right rhythm. And that someone said,- is the main purpose of our life: following the right rhythm. If we can stay at that level for a longer period of time we can also reach a higher awareness. Then another interesting question came up: Is there a universal rhythm ? Can we all ever be at a certain synchronicity ?

In other times there were other rhythms and one of them is mentioned in a piece of music that I told my guests about...

                                      

ANDANTE : meaning = step by step…no need to say those time travellers seem to have had another tempo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y4Fkxg7WcA  

PS: after the session we had a rather long after session and also went to another bar where there was life music,…a great jam session with a brilliant trumpet player…we happened to make the acquaintance and told him about our earlier discussion about rhythm : this is what he said:

“if I dance with a girl and she does not have the right rhythm --- I know NO”

we just smiled…