WTWN #88 - Cadence is the Magic Maker
How the Rhythm of Existence Creates Meaning
Rhythm is everything in the universe. Everything dances.
— Maya Angelou
It’s Sunday again, and the world has not ended.
We might well survive.
There’s a rhythm to things, a cadence that carries us even when we don’t have the energy to carry ourselves. The cadence is beyond willpower, beyond motivation. It keeps things in place. We wake up, brew the coffee, send the children off to school, and head to work, pressing forward even when we feel we can’t.
I used to think momentum alone would carry me. If I moved fast enough, I’d stay ahead of whatever threatened to pull me under. But it’s not the speed that saves—it’s adherence to the cadence, the specific, often mundane tasks that punctuate time.
The days fold into each other, and a disproportionate number of tasks are done out of habit rather than inspiration: The rituals we perform without needing to believe in them or give them much thought.
Who among us is inspired to make their bed? Yet we do it. Every. Single. Day.
Even poems find their eventual meaning in movement. My MFA thesis advisor, Catherine Barnett, wrote at the bottom of more of my poems than I can count, "Keep going.”
There are things we must do.
We can’t stop. We’re not done.
So, I don’t stop. Not when exhaustion hits me like the 9 o’clock train. Not when my thoughts run dark and feel stuck like molasses, when I’m stewing in worst-case scenarios.
As I wrote before, the end of the world always feels closer than it is. Hopefully, every time it seems we’re at the end of something, life calls out, “Not yet. Not yet.”
Not yet for whatever it is we fear we’re losing. Not yet for whatever part of us thinks we’re too tired, too old, too late for whatever it was we were pursuing. Not yet for love, for work, for possibility. Not yet for the magic that occurs eventually if we stay long enough to allow it to happen.
So, another week begins. The air is starting to smell springlike. And my body, worn down by a pesky cold the past couple weeks, is healing, yet another small, significant proof that nothing lasts forever, that we, like the Dude, abide.
The cadence abides, and along with it, so do we.