One of my businesses, The Spa on Green Street, sponsored the Gainesville Symphony’s Christmas Concert in years’ past and the ad we designed for the program played off the musical theme with the phrase “The rests are as important as the notes…” I hadn’t given that ad much thought lately, but I was getting a massage the other day and my therapist was telling me about a technique called the Bowen Method that she had learned and wanted to share with me. The technique was about “notes” and “rests.”
What little I now know about this therapeutic bodywork technique is that the practitioner uses thumbs or forefingers to apply gently rolling pressure on specific points on the body. Breaks of roughly two minutes are taken between each series of moves, giving the autonomic nervous system time to assimilate the new information and for the therapy to set in. These are the “rests” that punctuate the “notes.”
As you might imagine, one of the challenges to introducing and commencing this therapy is that people in general have lost an understanding generally as to the importance of rests or breaks. We are a society on the go, so much so that many people have difficulty getting something that should be totally natural to us: a good night’s sleep. When you think about it musically, or even linguistically for that matter, the rhythm and therefore the lovely form of music and poetry would be lost were it not for the rests between the notes.
My boys occasionally sit down at our piano and for some reason unknown to most adults, they, like most children, push down and hold the sustaining pedal whenever they play. The dampened notes eventually slur into one another and the distinct notes, lovely in their own right, are quickly swallowed by the growing cacophony. The space between the notes is as important as the notes themselves to the overall construction of a musical piece.
So it is in life. Everyone else in your world has the opportunity to watch and hear the sounds of your living. If you are always on the go, incapable of resting, you may end up playing a lot of notes but the resulting “sound” will be lacking definition, form and likely, grace. Take care to rest when you can. Don’t panic when there is a lull in the action. Relax into the arms of the break, the silence, the pause. Breathe out.
There are rests available in any schedule. Their period may be short, but as it is said, short can sometimes be sweet.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Gregory Hake 
Wonderful points! Times of rest, seeming nothingness, pause, relaxation, quiet, reflection…these are part of the rhythms that make all the more active phases of our lives meaningful , effective and beautiful. Perceiving the subtlety of oscilation between the active and passive phases of expression is so central to artistry and command in living!
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This is such a great analogy and the idea of notes and rest permeates all aspects of life. Even a bird in flight rests between wing beats.
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Well said. I’ve realized the rests aren’t only the traditional two week vacation. They’re the pause in the middle of the busiest time or even what can feel like the chaotic ones, to appreciate this life we are given, to take note of the detail. Happy Thanksgiving!
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This really is such a profound attitude to have, one that as human beings we can influence the world in such beautiful ways. There is pulsation evident in every area of life as we know it, and one without the other becomes meaningless in the sense that a note without its rest and a rest without its note loses definition, meaning and value.
To me, there is nothing sweeter than a well-earned rest, and with a well-earned rest comes a well-deserved note – some emphasis does need to follow, where something created, something of value is accomplished or else the rest is not quite fitting. And moreover, the attitude involved in the action also weighs in to the quality of rest. To exemplify, within the time of action, there is also rest. You hear a note in music for instance, and if you dissect it, you will find that there are mini-pulses of alternating amplitudes of sound and non-sound which converge to create the overall sound that you hear.
If we as human beings are analogous instruments, we would always want to be in tune and mindful of the quality of our conscious activities, remembering that every action has micro-cycles of rest which can almost seem impercetible to the casual listener, but to the performer, they are ever so critical to the overall quality of the sound and song!
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
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Let us take note of even the pattern of one’s own breathe. Even within the breathe there are the pauses, the wonderful space, between the in- breathe and the out- breathe. For balance in the living of our Lifes, there must be the empty and quiet spaces.
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Happy Thanksgiving Gregg!
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