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The Space Between Your Ears and Your Hands

Serenity, focus, and connection.

By TJ GhinderPublished 3 years ago 2 min read
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The Space Between Your Ears and Your Hands
Photo by Lasse Møller on Unsplash

I was playing the softest open roll I possibly could. Against the metronome of my mind I am playing quintuplets; lost inside the rattling of the springs beneath a snare drum, counting the shakes that subdivide each pulse in my hands. The notes move rapidly, but I can feel the silence between all of them.

I remember this moment surreally well. I was being judged on my performance—competing even. I was face to face with the man who would be ticking off our drum score when everything was all said and done. A man I respected. A man who made more money playing the field drum in one year than I would in the next decade of my life. He is in acute focus. Behind him, my instructor and our sound board. And behind them yet, tens of thousands of silhouettes blurred by distance and darkness. My eyes faced the silhouettes, but my brain was elsewhere entirely.

Instead, it was wrapped around my sticks in the pads of my fingers, and winding between metal strings. Time doesn’t exist in this moment. In my ears I can feel the texture of the surface I’m hitting, and the pocket of air beneath it vibrating. My fingers are made of wood. I hear and feel the shape of the sound around me, and all of my conscious focus is on the simple act of keeping that shape a perfectly symmetrical murmur.

Despite everything about that moment—the thousands of fans, the intense pressure of adjudicated performance, my responsibility to my tight-nit community... the feeling that took me back there today was the serenity of being completely detached from my typical senses, and lost in a reality fully reconstructed to suit the present moment.

I didn’t realize until later on in my life that this is meditation. This is what people mean when they talk about “enlightenment;” being in the space where the separation between yourself and the universe entirely disappears. I didn’t realize how cleansing it is for the mind to breathe in that space, and how important it is for our mental well-being to spend time there, regularly.

The time that I spent doing drum corps was truly special. There aren’t many activities whose success hinges on such a huge amount of people simultaneously losing themselves completely in that state of focused control—where “you” and “me” and “us” are just faucets for a reality we are painting, together. Some of my closest relationships to this day are with people whom I shared that experience with.

The space between my ears and my hands is the distance between my senses and my soul. Some of my fondest memories are of sharing that space with my friends. In it lies my community, my family, my Church… really, it isn’t restricted to the space between my ears and my hands, at all.

I visited that place today. It was nice.

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