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“Don’t Rush the Spaces”
By Todd Nelson
Waiting is the hardest part. We don’t customarily think of playing a musical instrument to be as much about not making noise as about making noise—about not blowing your trumpet, not plucking the bass string, not hitting the drum. Learning to play a solo, or in unison, or with syncopation turns out to be a special kind of wait training. It is learning to put silences between sounds, and that is what makes the sounds so special.
I learned this from African drumming teacher Kevin Campbell. He used an interesting phrase when talking with the kids at my school about the interstices between hits on their djembe and conga drums. “Don’t rush the spaces,” he said, as he was working with one class of 5th grade drummers.
Since nature, apparently “abhors a vacuum,” it’s hard not to rush. But as I thought about it, I realized that spaces in time and distance aren’t necessarily so empty. They have a purpose. They are filled with something: silence, longing, anticipation, or room. Spaces hold something, even when we see or hear nothing inside them.
Kevin’s phrase caused me to start considering the number of temptations in a day to “rush the spaces” between “notes.”
Simple observation is a valuable skill and can’t take place with depth and mindfulness if we’re rushing. For example, the kids at my school have been watching the glorious monarch butterfly chrysalises in our dooryard. Should we think in terms of the “space” between caterpillar and winged insect? Or perhaps the space that the newly hatched butterfly takes to let its wings dry in preparation for flight? What does it think so as not to rush the space? And then as soon as it takes flight, it’s gotta rush the space–from here to Mexico!
In art class, when our students go out to draw neighborhood buildings from a certain perspective, they are accustomed to not rushing the negative spaces. They discover that what’s not told by pencil lines or paint is every bit as important as what is filled in. The same can be said of narrative technique in writing. Any mystery story writer knows that the mere mention of a door, or perhaps an old seaman’s chest locked shut…having been recently discovered in, say, a dark recess of the derelict attic…is a tempting or even deliciously horrifying lack of description. Don’t rush the spaces between words—and don’t open that door…just yet!
The 60 feet, six inches of space between the pitcher’s mound and the strike zone is one of the most sublime stretches of anticipation and longing in the known universe. The ballpark crowd certainly abhors a vacuum: “Swing batter!” Or, “No, don’t swing!” An instant’s decision about timing and rhythm and space creates the grand slam symphony or ignominious sour strikeout note. Don’t rush the spaces between curveball release and swing.
A physicist might understand distances in time and space somewhat differently. Consider the interstellar voids to be observed in the night sky. And all that’s observable by our eyes doesn’t even add up to the quantum values for known matter. There must be something in the spaces that we don’t yet understand. Spaces await description, definition, and scientific understanding. They contain dark matter, we conjecture, so we keep listening to the spaces filled with light years.
So waiting is anticipation, getting ready for that next beat, the next cadence, the next chance to imitate baba Kevin on the djembe, and echo his beguiling rhythms–or the chance to swing at whatever junk that lefty pitcher can muster, standing so confidently sixty feet away.
Back at my school, we await the next chance to sit in a circle and play the African drums with Baba Kevin. In the meanwhile, the kids have rounded up a bunch of #10 cans, 5 gallon buckets, and trash cans. At recess, they’re rushing the spaces with a glorious percussive chorus out behind the school. Yes, waiting is the hardest part.
Todd R. Nelson is Head of School at The School in Rose Valley (Pennsylvania).
