My wife is part of a writing club. Sometimes she shares the prompts with me, and even sometimeser I write something based on them (though I am generally watching our kids while she participates in the conviviality of the club without me). This month’s prompt was about time, so I wrote this.

Physicists tell us that time is part of the fabric of space. Passage in time is relative to movement in space. Neuroscientists tell us the perception of time is altered by the brain. Intense focus, what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named flow, makes hours pass like minutes. Adrenaline slows the feeling of time’s passage. If you have ever had a near death experience you know the extreme end of this. Hydroplaning from the middle of a busy six-lane highway to the median must have taken a few seconds, but in my memory I can replay it frame by frame in slow motion. It’s as if, sensing an imminent end, you squeeze the most possible awareness of the final moments of life.

Philosophers of time (there of course are such people) speak of time as a relationship. Events are points. Our current position is defined by the ones that have passed. Once a point is passed it cannot be un-passed. You are forever changed in relation to it.

Changes in this relationship can be welcomed or accepted haltingly. The speaker in Wendell Berry’s poem, “A meeting,” dreams of seeing a dead friend. The friend “has gone long and far / and yet he is the same.” He has ceased passing points in time and his relationship to them is fixed. Seeing his sameness the “living one” realizes, with perhaps a twinge of regret, the extent of his change: “grown strange to what I once was.” The same theme is taken up in another of Berry’s poems, “Leaving.” In the inner voice of the dying, this poem realizes that even in the moments of departure a loved one “remain[s] / on the earth we knew, already changing / into the earth you know.” To live is to change.

The actual past is fixed of course—like the dead, it does not change—but our relationship to it is interpreted. Like history, it is written and rewritten. New experiences shed light on old, memories fade and often sweeten. Certain storylines reach their conclusion and we reinterpret earlier events. That our lives contain “storylines” shows what a coagulation our memory exerts on the viscous mass of life events.

If regret is the primary negative emotion of the past its temporal opposite is anxiety. It is easy to worry about those things yet to pass. Memory is filled with the unusual and extraordinary. We expect that the future will be made of similar events. Regular days don’t make much dent in our recollection, but they will be the lion’s share of the future. On any given day you will probably not do anything remembered at the end of life, much less in a year. Surely some future days will be extraordinary, some will be evil, but most will be normal.

What to do then with this past that plagues us, the unknowable future, and the often boring present? This brings us to the best advice I have ever heard. It comes from an interview with the Irish poet David Whyte: “The only way to change the past is the quality of attention we give to the present.”

This statement can save us from looking too much back and too far ahead. Doing either diminishes our ability to render the unknowable future into a meaningful past. Attention of a good quality takes our moments and our days and folds them into the story of our lives.

I can’t sleep. It’s not unusual that I have trouble sleeping the night I play a concert. When I lay down the music starts playing over and I think about how things went. But tonight was special, because people listened. They really, really listened.

Our local record store has a new space big enough for small concerts (I didn’t realize until tonight we were actually the first). It’s an amazing shop, everything you could want is there including a quiet listening room that just has classical CDs and vinyl with good headphones to try things out. Gene, the owner, is an absolute enclyopedia of repertoire and recordings. We always have amazing chats about whatever music we’ve been into. He is someone who believes in the power of listening closely, which is why he wanted to start hosting concerts for classical musicians.

My friend Seth is an incredibly fine cellist. Really he’s one of the best musicians I’ve ever played with. This was our second concert cycle together and we’ve gotten to know each other’s playing. What we in music call having “ensemble” - a sense of togetherness. Someone had the idea for this program to play a complete Bach suite that has both a cello and lute version (me playing a guitar arrangement of Bach’s lute arrangement) by trading movements. Kind of unorthodox, but it really worked! Even for someone who loves Bach as much as I do, 25 minutes of music in the same key for a solo instrument can tire the ears out. The changes of instrument worked beautifully and was really successful.

Part way through the first movement of Bach I played, it happened. It’s happened before, but it doesn’t happen every concert. I could feel the energy of everyone in the room listening to the same sound and entering the music with me. When that happens, it’s almost as if you become a spectator too, hearing the music through the ears of everyone else. A 300-year-old piece of music I’ve played for almost twenty years was brand new, as vivid and alive as the day Bach wrote it down. Like a Bob Dylan song says: “every one of them [notes] rang true and glowed like burning coal, pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.”

It is a sacred moment.

I practice and prepare for these things, but I’ve played enough to know that you can’t make this moment happen alone. Everyone has to join you with their full attention. It’s a gift every time.

I have three children, a son (currently 6) and twin girls (3-and-a-half). More precisely, identical twin girls. Split from the same zygote, they have the same DNA. And yet, they are utterly different people. From the first hours of their lives, we began to notice differences. B wanted to cuddle up with her sister. E wanted to finally get some space to herself. One slept easily and beautifully from day one, the other needed a lot of cuddling and reassurance before she would sleep, and she always (always) wakes up first whether from nap or bedtime. The lifetime hours of sleep she has robbed from her sister would be an amazing number.

In this, their third year, we have noticed something remarkable. B is in many respects exactly like our son. More like him in fact than her genetic replica and constant companion since birth. She has his personality, the same hangups about how things are done, the same sleep struggles. Just like him, every button on a shirt must be fastened and every zipper pulled all the way to the top. They will both only pee in one bathroom, and only poop in the other. They play together beautifully, both wanting to run around and crash into things while our other daughter plays dolls or house or dress-up.

Children are such a wonder. They are born and you think you know everything about them. A few years later, and you just watch in awe at all the things contained in these mysterious little people.

If you are someone, like me, who reads books about music, I have a very important piece of advice.

In musician and composer biographies, memoirs, retrospectives, etc., many authors, perhaps jealous of the kinds of affects music is capable of, spend many pages describing music. Lengthy descriptions, colorful language, the most adjectival adjectives. I can think of several culprits, but the worst is Jan Swafford. Of the 848 pages of his Mozart: The Reign of Love (a magnificent biography by every other measure) I would estimate 200 pages are dedicated to descriptions of operas. So many pages that he runs out of words to describe them; at least three opera plots are described as possessing “various contretemps”. (I haven’t read his Charles Ives biography but I can only imagine how his thesaurus felt after that one was finished.)

Here’s the advice: when an author begins describing a piece of music, stop reading. Go listen to the music. Skip the description and carry on. You will be much the better for it.

I’ve taught a lot of guitar lessons over the years. I stopped counting at 10,000, and that was quite a while ago. This means I’ve taught hundreds of students. When it was my main source of income (basically all of my 20s) I was not in a financial position to be picky about who I taught, so I saw all kinds. After a while you notice a pattern, a typology that recapitulates every few students. Here are some of the folks that come through your studio:

The six-year old with type-A parents

You are a substitute for piano lessons. Piano lessons, of course, are a vehicle for pressure-testing the hopes and dreams of the parents. Well-heeled families approach their children’s education with the intensity of Wall Street floor traders. Any day could be ruinous for future prosperity.

The mother almost always brings the student to lessons. (The father, one imagines, is too busy closing deals that use esoteric financial instruments to raise your rent thirty percent in exchange for providing munitions to jihadists.) You can spot her from across the parking lot, deeply tanned with fresh highlights glimmering as she descends an SUV the size of your first apartment. A few of these students do very well. The rest are crushed by great expectations. Maybe a lacrosse scholarship is in their future.

The wannabe rocker

Catchphrase: “It can’t be taught, you have to feel it.” A curious opinion for someone forking out $75/hour to be taught whatever it is. This person has probably played more air guitar than you played actual guitar. The scourge of record-store owners since their teenage years, they have complete scorn for all things technique. “You think Stevie Ray Vaughan practiced scales?! He was just rocking for hours a day.” Suggesting that if hours a day were being spent on the guitar in this circumstance we could expect some real progress leads to a change of subject. The least painful way of spending this half hour is usually chatting about favorite records.

Some wannabe rockers actually play the guitar, but not well enough to make a career at it. They often become music store teachers with the catchphrase, “It can’t be taught, you have to feel it.

The child of the wannabe rocker

A variation of the wannabe rocker is the dad (always a dad) who understands his opportunity has passed. This of course means the frustrated dream must be laid upon the child, like a student loan that transfers to your family when you die. “Did you guys rock today?! 🤘” he always asks at pickup.

When I’m asked this question I understand how Europeans feel when Americans ask “What’s up?” I take the same tack and do not answer. In most cases the answer is, “your offspring cannot play a single chord after six months, but you always pay your bill on time and I need the money so I’m going to smile and give a polite chuckle before giving another reminder of the necessity of daily practice time.”

The wildly optimistic adult

Many students come to the guitar for the first time as adults. These tend to show up in January, but sometimes following significant milestones. A birthday ending in a -0, for example, or perhaps retirement or even divorce. Something has lit the fire that it is time to learn this thing they have always wanted to do. Retirees have the advantage of time on their hands. Though their brains are not as elastic, they can actually spend time on it and do well. It’s the high-achieving, mid-career, president of the HOA, marathon running, community volunteer, father of five who really overestimates how well this will go. “With all those responsibilities how much do you expect you’ll be able practice?” I always ask. “Oh, an hour a day or so, maybe more on the weekends.” “The weekends when you run 10 miles, coach all of your kids’ soccer teams, and deliver food to shut-ins before teaching Sunday school?”

They’ve been good at everything they have ever done, so when the guitar doesn’t take they usually turn to something else quickly. Perhaps starting another nonprofit or digging a well in the third world. Something manageable.

The wildly pessimistic adult

This person, despite having a career and devoted family, insists they have never been good at anything and will probably not be good at this either. “Really struggled this week.” “Not getting anywhere on this thing.” “I’m sorry to make you listen to this.”

The funny thing is, these students often make very good progress, but they never believe that.

The theorist

A typical adult male specimen. The student who cannot play worth beans, but has many theories about the guitar and playing it effectively. Theories that are, of course, untested, since he cannot play. But he was reading an interesting post in a forum last week about the geometry of wrist angles and attack velocity. He usually has significant opinions about the construction of guitars and various tone woods. Don’t get him started on rounded versus straight nail profiles. The luthier-built guitar he has sounds great…in theory. But since, alas, all that wrist geometry is purely theoretical we might never know. Perhaps when he has finished trying every guitar string currently in manufacture it will sound better. For 9-12 months, he will challenge all of the advice you offer, will not practice, and will eventually move on to try his theories on another teacher.

The Switfies / Smithies

There is a pretty consistent breakdown among the teenage girls who take guitar lessons. 30% are alt, angsty teens who listen to The Smiths and would like to play The Smiths. Black nail polish, thrifted Dark Side of the Moon t-shirts, Doc Martens. They don’t fit in at school and you are always slightly worried about them. The other 70% are buoyant Taylor Swift fans, whose piety has led them to take up the guitar itself as an act of devotion. After learning a few songs, the bright ones notice that they all used the same four chords. For those not truly devoted to the genius of Taylor Swift, the bubble will burst. Knowing that all of her songs use the same chord progressions, the same structure, and are basically all the same will disabuse them of the illusion that she is a brilliant musician. For the truly devout though, it will only confirm everything. “Only a true genius could make so many amazing songs out of the same four chords!”

The human heart is a wonder.

Every fall I visit the 3rd grade class of a friend who teaches elementary music. I play some guitar music and talk about it, but mostly I answer their questions. They ask the most amazing questions.

A sampling from my last few visits:

“Why is the guitar shaped like that?”

“Why does the guitar have six strings? Could it have more?”

“Are there guitars that are really big or really small?”

“Why does it sound that way?”

“Who invented the guitar?”

“Who invented music?”

“Why do different instruments sound different ways?”

“What’s your favorite thing about the guitar?”

“How long does it take to get really good at the guitar?”

“How do you make it sound like two instruments at the same time?”

Not yet burdened with the imaginary shame of not knowing things, they ask these with utter sincerity because they want to know the answer. We would do well to follow their example.

Though I have spoken of it often throughout my life, I realized I have never written down my memories of 9/11 and the following days. Here’s how I remember it.

In the fall of 2001 I was ten years old. A Tuesday near the beginning of the school year should have been like any other. Our homeschool routine was to have “together time” first thing, though not early. A family of night owls, our school day began around 9 with readalouds, vocabulary words, history, and memory work (scripture and poems) then we would all go to our individual work for the rest of the morning.

This Tuesday was slightly unusual in that my parents were both out of town in Denver, 1600 miles away. My sister-in-law—my oldest brother’s wife—and my nine-month-old nephew were staying with us. There were four kids living at home at the time. My sister almost seventeen, my next older brother thirteen, me, and my younger brother about to turn seven. Another brother was off at college, and the oldest married with his first child living in town (and in our house that week).

We were in the living room reading when the house phone rang. House phones, of course, were still the primary means of communicating with anyone outside the home and were always answered when they rang. That was the last normal thing that would happen for a long time.

Whoever answered it came back quickly, “Turn on the TV, there was a plane crash!” We were not in the habit of turning on the television during the day, I couldn’t imagine why this was worthy of interrupting school. “A plane crash” did nothing to prepare us for the image that greeted us on the screen, one that everyone in the world was watching at that moment.

In Denver, my father had just been heading downstairs for his first meeting of the day. A lady in the elevator asked where he was going like it was shocking anyone was going anywhere. “To my meeting,” he offered. “It’ll be cancelled, go back to your room and watch the news.” She must have been convincing, he went back and found my mom glued to the tv having just heard herself.

A few years ago reminiscing about this day someone said, “Can you imagine if there had been twitter on that day?” This thought chilled me. How different would the national experience have been if everyone were getting their news piecemeal, unverified, conspiracy-laden from the start? The days and weeks of potent unity we remember so vividly may not have happened.

My parents soon called the house, “We’re coming home. It will take a few days, we think we’ll have to drive.” They were certainly not going to wait around to see how long air travel would be grounded—they knew they had to get home. Even driving turned out to be difficult. Every rental car in Denver was claimed immediately. Even the U-Haul store was cleaned out. Eventually they sat in the waiting room of a rental agency waiting for a car to be returned before starting the 24-hour drive home. Once on the road they didn’t stop, taking turns driving and napping, talking with complete strangers at every gas stop along Interstate 70. Everyone was on their way home.

My main memory of the day itself is visceral. A knot my stomach had never made before. Of all the ages I could have been, ten was a very tender one. Old enough to understand something world-changing had happened, not old enough to understand what that might mean. My teenage siblings were theorizing about terrorists and retaliatory actions, my little brother not quite old enough to really get it. I was filled with dread and my parents weren’t home.

Pretty quickly I dismissed myself and went upstairs to do anything else away from the TV. I was up there when the second plane hit. “Come back downstairs, we’re watching history!” I much preferred reading about the Fertile Crescent in Story of the World than watching it unfold 150 miles away.

Though not as significant a part of our cultural memory, the other two crashes, into the Pentagon and Flight 93 heroically brought down by passengers in Pennsylvania, gave the day a sense of unending disaster. We were all watching the news as it broke, one plane after the next. After four crashes why not more? When would it end? If you drew a triangle with points on NYC, Washington D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, we lived right in that triangle. It felt incredibly close. It was very close. Traveling at airliner speed another fifteen minutes in the air could have put it in our county.

Then the first tower fell.

At some point we realized lunchtime had come and gone. My sister made a package of ramen noodles, giving me a bowl of mostly broth saying, “We’ll have to get used to having less food now.” She meant it as a joke but at the time I thought she was serious. The idea of a land war in North America seemed completely possible to me. “We are under attack” was a phrase used all day long on the news. My sister and I laughed about this years later, she had no memory of it at all.

My parents made it back by Wednesday night, but nothing was normal for a while. In fact, nothing ever returned to how it was before. There is a lot of nostalgia right now about the 90’s. Everyone wants their kids to have a “90s summer” or “90s childhood.” They are mostly taking about technology and screens when they say this, but a world without a 9/11 is a different world. One less frightening, where danger is farther off and home a safer place.

There’s a scrappy muscadine vine that grows between my neighbor’s yard and mine. It doesn’t make much fruit (some years none at all), but when the grapes are ripe eating them is a ritual of memory. The only other place I’ve ever eaten a muscadine was my grandfather’s farm, and they never fail to bring back memories of days spent there. Some of the best days of my life. Today was the day to taste some of those memories again. The muscadines are like Ray Bradbury’s jars of dandelion wine holding the memories of each Green Town summer past.

The brain scientists tell us that taste and memory are connected because they are processed near one another in the brain. This answer is profoundly uninteresting. The psalmist tells us to “taste and see.” Flavor and vision put together. “Take and eat, this is my body,” invites us to the table of the Lord. Food is somehow the thing itself, and also the symbol of so much more. I don’t pretend to fully understand the mystery, but when I taste the muscadine I know something true and profound I don’t know any other way.

In my lifetime there have been two public figures who made their public lives about kindness and uniting people: Fred Rogers and Dolly Parton. Both gone now, with no viable candidates to replace them.

Mr. Rogers made his life about service, kindness, and attention. When he hosted guests on his show (generally chosen because of their marginal status) the thing that is most impressive is the intensity of attention he bestows on everyone. The kind of attention many people can go their whole lives without receiving. Attention like this is so rare. Those who receive it from him seem to glow. They become the best version of themselves as he watches.

When he received a lifetime achievement award and had the chance to give a speech to the best and brightest of show business, he did two things with the opportunity. First was the gentlest reminder that being in entertainment, just like ministry, which he was ordained into as well, should be a life of service. The calling is to improve the lives of others. The second thing he did was remind everyone they had helpers (”look for the helpers,” as he taught us on his show). He asks them to take a moment of quiet to think about the people who helped them succeed. “I’ll keep the time.” In seconds, the camera pans across eyes filled with tears across the room. At an event where the most famous people in the world gather to congratulate themselves on their success, a mild-mannered puppeteer found a way to utterly reorient the values in the room in just a few moments. You could imagine a similar scene if Jesus showed up in the War Room.

Though her life was certainly more glamorous than Mr. Rogers’s, Dolly Parton demonstrated the same ability to pay attention to those around here. There are so many stories of her kindness to studio crews, cameramen, and particularly musicians. She always had time to speak with everyone and see them where they were. Like Mr. Rogers, she always remembered her helpers. When Porter Wagner fell on hard times later in life, Dolly purchased the rights to his back catalogue and gave them to him as a gift. He had taken advantage of her in a vulnerable moment in her early career, but she chose to remember that he had gotten her started in show business and taught her to succeed.

Her secretive philanthropic work has slowly gotten out over the years. It’s notable for the local focus. She helped nearly anyone, but in particular she helped the people where she was from. She is probably the most locally rooted of any celebrity, always keeping a connection where she grew up and investing heavily in the area. Paying attention to its needs and challenges was part of this. So many people in her position insulate themselves from real life and the people around them, but she was always of the people.

And whatever else she might have done, she never forgot that songs are what bring people together. In a clip I saw this week, she was asked about the song in a time capsule at Dollywood to be opened in 2045. She said why she had done it (”It’s a very good song!”) and how there were included instructions for how to play a CD in case everyone had forgotten by then. “How do you think people will react when they hear the song in 2045?” the host asks. “Well, I hope you like my song.”

Over the last few years I’ve developed an exercise to help make purchasing decisions. It is quite easy and in general is very effective.

Here it is: picture you are at the end of your life. One last thing you have to do before you enter the next is look at the pile of trash you generated during your lifetime. Imagine the things you would see! Some good things like childhood toys, mementos, that pair of jeans that fit just perfectly but you finally wore out beyond repair. The shoes you’re wearing in every picture of you from college. You will be happy to see these again. They added something to your life.

Then there’s the real garbage. The stuff that was halfway to the trash when you bought it. The cheapo utensils. The paper plates. The fast fashion clothes. The toaster with an LED screen that doesn’t get hot enough to burn you. Thirty or forty smart phones full of gold and cobalt that cannot be repaired once broken. Thirty non-stick pans that each lasted about two years. These are the things you will be filled with dread upon seeing. It’s embarrassing to go through so much garbage in a single life. This pile contains so much plastic.

Looking closely, you might notice there are some things conspicuously missing from the pile. Your cast iron skillet is being used by someone else back on earth. Your guitar(s) have passed on to your son who has taken it up. Your father’s watch is still ticking, or at least kept on a dresser as a memento. The vintage Stanley planes you collected and used in the woodshed [my 2nd person ruse is breaking down here] were already a hundred years old when you got them. They easily have another century in them. The good kitchen knives you got for a wedding present just need sharpened up and they are ready to go for at least another lifetime. On it goes. Some of the things you used the most have not worn out.

So before you buy something just ask: do I really want to see this on the garbage pile of my life?