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Mindfulness

The Tempo of the Present Moment

Are you flowing with, or against it?

Blake Alan

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Photo by Florian G: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-a-moving-metronome-7220729/

When I’m playing bass guitar faster than the beat of a song, I’m rushing. When playing too slow, I’m dragging. Doing this creates tension that breaks up the flow in the music.

But the woes of rushing and dragging are universal. When we do this in life, it also creates tension. Stopping this means identifying the tempo of the moment and flowing with it.

Rushing the beat

The tension of rushing occurs when we try to push something to move faster than it should.

This has less to do with being quick, and more to do with a state of mind that isn’t in line with the tempo of the present moment.

How this works is while the body is doing one thing, the mind has moved on to the next thing. The mind then gets irritated that the body hasn’t caught up. This creates stress and has us scrambling to get to the next task.

Rushing like this causes mistakes, like overlooking something obvious, or in my case, struggling to put pants on.

One morning, I woke up to several missed calls from the manager of my apartment complex. While I wondered why they would call me so many times, I realized I was supposed to move my car…

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