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My Philosophy
My Philosophy
We were taught to turn the unknown
into something known.
I think that's deeply flawed strategy.
We were taught to turn the unknown
into something known.
I think that's deeply flawed strategy.
Why I believe learning to navigate the unknown skillfully is the most important thing we can practice, and why I do it through sound.
Maybe you're here because
Maybe you're here because
Something that used to feel natural doesn't anymore.
Something that used to feel natural doesn't anymore.
You've done a lot. You're capable. On paper, things may even look good. But something that once oriented you has gone quiet. The world feels harder to read. Conversations don't land the way they used to. Moves that used to work fall flat.
It often shows up first with the people you're closest to. A hard conversation where the words either fly out before you've gathered yourself or they don't come at all. Then you spend two days replaying it.
You think you know what should help. And then it doesn't. And underneath it is usually a deeper question: why is this happening, and is there a way through that doesn't cost me what I care most about?
So here is the case I want to make on this page. What you're running into is not a flaw in you. It's a strategy, handed to all of us, that works beautifully on the knowable and fails on nearly everything else. There is another skill. Almost nobody teaches it, and it can be practiced.
This page is my take on all this. You may not agree, which is fine. This is just how I've come to see it, and why I do this work the way I do.
Where this came from
Where this came from
The night the piano answered me back.
The night the piano answered me back.
Some years ago, in the middle of separating from my second marriage, I was about as low as I have been. I felt disconnected from nearly everything I had ever put my faith in. I found myself wondering whether it was even okay to be here in this universe at all. Einstein once said the most important question a person can ask is whether the universe is a friendly place. I was deep into that question and I felt profoundly alone.
The only place I found any consolation was the piano. One day as I was going through the handful of tunes I'd tinkered with many times before, I just started banging on the bass notes with open hands, palms and spread fingers, making as much deep noise as I could, and immediately started sobbing.
The part of me in agonizing aloneness realized that somehow the universe, through whatever mechanism, was able to reflect back from the outside exactly how that part of me was feeling on the inside.
The universe could not only recognize how I was feeling. It could answer me back in kind. Even though I was the one making the sounds at the piano, that lonely, pre-verbal part of me felt acknowledged and cared for.
That was experiential proof, undeniable to the part of me that needed it most, that I was not alone after all. After 10-15 minutes of noise and sobs, I felt drawn to playing something more calm, consonant, and soothing. The whole arc took twenty or thirty minutes. When I got up, I felt more connected, more relaxed, more reassured. The agony had softened. The path forward felt possible again.
I started sitting down more and more. It was not a straight line, but things shifted in ways I could trust. And one thing struck me as I went. All it took was me and the piano. I would not be dependent on any particular partner, teacher, or support system. As long as I could sit down at the keys, I could quite reliably find my way back to myself in about ten minutes. That felt sustainable for a lifetime.
What I think is really going on
What I think is really going on
The strategy isn't yours. You were handed it.
The strategy isn't yours. You were handed it.
As best we can tell, reality is matter and energy trading places with each other, probabilistically. We have only known this for about a hundred years. And knowing a thing is not the same as living from it. Almost none of us have taken it in deeply enough for it to change how we actually go at a problem.
Our minds were not built for that anyway. They evolved to navigate a world of solid things that mostly stay where you put them, and they got very good at it. The core strategy they reach for seems to be a good one: turn unknowns into knowns. Figure it out. Make it certain. It built almost everything.
Which means we are running a strategy built for a world that turns out not to be quite the one we are in. That strategy has huge limitations. Many of the problems we face now, personally and collectively, do not yield to it. They are emotional, relational, and genuinely new. So when the old map stops working, we do more of the only thing we were taught: we think harder, analyze more, try to convert the unknown into something solved. And we get stuck.
Up close, that stuckness is a matter of timing rather than character. A moment gets charged and we fire before we've landed, or we go quiet and say nothing at all. We hold out for understanding before we'll act. We soften what we were about to say until there's nothing left of it, and then call that being considerate. None of those are flaws. They are what a good strategy looks like when it's applied where it doesn't fit.
And almost nobody gets to practice anything else. Families hand out roles early and rarely renegotiate them. Most friend groups have someone whose quiet job is keeping things smooth, and that person's honest note never gets played. Couples get very good at reading each other and lose track of what they themselves are feeling. In most rooms any of us are in, being uncertain out loud costs something.
The institutions are no help either. School sorts children into musical and not musical somewhere around the age of ten, and for most people that sort holds for the rest of their lives. Music education measures skill by how accurately you reproduce what somebody else already wrote down. Workplaces reward the fast confident answer and quietly penalize "I don't know yet." None of that is inside one person's reach to change.
It also runs back further than any of us. Your grandparents almost certainly sang. Somewhere in the last three or four generations, making music stopped being something people did and became something people were qualified to do, and now singing in front of one other person can feel like an audition. Families pass down verdicts, too. We're not musical. We don't make a fuss. The silence gets handed down as though it were manners.
So each of us arrives here trying to run an entire life from the smallest, slowest part of ourselves.
The conscious, analyzing mind handles about 40 bits per second. The rest of you handles millions. The part we trust to figure things out is the smallest, slowest part of the system.
I want to be careful about what I'm claiming here. None of this is an excuse, and I'm not offering it as one. But if any of it has ever felt like a personal failing, it has had an enormous amount of help.
What I believe, that not everyone will
What I believe, that not everyone will
Learning to navigate the unknown is the most essential skill we could possibly learn.
Learning to navigate the unknown is the most essential skill we could possibly learn.
Turning unknowns into knowns is not bad. It can be wonderful. But it can also distract us from the harder, more important work: letting unknowns simply exist, and building a different kind of relationship with them. A different quality of experience inside the fact of not knowing.
As an idea, that may sound fine. In practice it is much harder than it sounds. Which is exactly why it has to be practiced. And here is the trap. Most practices that claim to help end up being one more version of turning unknowns into knowns. More analysis. More understanding. More figuring out.
What's needed is a practice where the experience of being can happen before the mind arrives to explain it.
"Would it be possible to subject to life instead of objecting to it? Is this playing with words, or does it possibly mean something?"
— Alan Watts
What I think is actually needed
What I think is actually needed
Six things, whether or not any of this runs through me.
Six things, whether or not any of this runs through me.
I'd rather say plainly what I think a person needs than describe what I happen to sell. So here is my honest list. If you can assemble it somewhere else, assemble it somewhere else.
- A field where nothing is riding on it. Not a lower-stakes version of a high-stakes thing. Actually low stakes, so that whatever surfaces is unmistakably yours and no cover story is available.
- Feedback fast enough to arrive before the explanation. Leave a gap and the mind fills it, and then you're thinking about the moment instead of being in it.
- Something nonverbal. Words wake up the part of us that wants to analyze, and that is not the part being trained here.
- The three questions, met in order, at the right speed. What's happening now. Who am I now. What do I do now. Most of the trouble is timing, so timing is what has to get practiced.
- Small and often, rather than large and occasional. Ten minutes most days does more than a weekend twice a year.
- Somebody to do it in front of who isn't evaluating you. This one is hard to arrange alone, and it's the one most often skipped.
Those are the elements. What follows is the form of them I trust most, and why.
Why I do this through sound
Why I do this through sound
Sound meets four of those six at once.
Sound meets four of those six at once.
Sound is nonverbal, so it doesn't have to wake up the analytical, word-bound part of the mind. And it gives instant feedback you can fold back into the part of you that's doing the playing, right away. Listening and playing, listening and playing, at the same time, lets you engage the unknown moment to moment, and slowly builds your capacity to stay there instead of bolting from it out of reflex.
The drum is good for this. It's simple enough to step into, and it still offers real complexity. The piano is even more powerful, because of its sheer range. Eighty-eight keys, ten fingers, soft to loud, the whole spectrum of feeling. It can meet almost anything you bring to it.
And the stakes are friendly by design. Nothing is riding on the sound you make. That isn't a limitation of the practice field. It's the whole reason it works as a mirror.
Not by quieting the world. By changing your relationship to what's unresolved in it.
How the practice works
How the practice works
Three questions, answered in real time.
Three questions, answered in real time.
Underneath every moment, whether you're at the piano or in a hard conversation, the same three questions are always live. Improvisation is where a person can learn to meet them in order, without rushing past them and without freezing on them.
What's happening now? Who am I now? What do I do now? Listen. Feel. Play. The instrument is important, but it is not the point.
You practice it on your piano. You play it in your day. That's the whole loop. The sounds made in a session are rehearsal for the choices made when it counts.
What I believe
What I believe
A few things I've come to trust.
A few things I've come to trust.
- Understanding a pattern rarely changes it. Experience does.
- The unknown is not a threat to manage. It's a condition of being alive.
- You are not broken, and you don't need fixing. You need contact.
- Listening comes before correctness. Always.
- The instrument matters, but it is not the point.
- Coming home to yourself should never depend on any one person, teacher, or system.
- Fear doesn't dissolve through certainty. It dissolves through contact, practiced in real time.
- Most of what goes wrong between people is timing, not character.
- The silence in a family gets passed down as though it were manners, and it can stop in any generation that decides to stop it.
- Our institutions run at the level of the fastest, smallest part of the mind, which is part of why they can't solve what we're facing.
When something's off
and you can't tap the flow,
Play your feelings out with sound.
Tune yourself in time.
Play your way home.
Healing systems and souls
Healing systems and souls
The morning I changed my question.
The morning I changed my question.
Throughout the '90s I was a passionate activist on campaign finance reform, and served for several years as secretary of the North Carolina Alliance for Democracy. I was very clear about the corrupting influence of private money in the selecting of our public representatives. During those years I produced videos for nonprofits and declined corporate work.
In June of 2001 I went to a conference in Halifax on authentic leadership. When the microphone came around in a room of about fifty management consultants, most people named something from their own workplaces or from places they were consulting for. When the mic came to me, I observed that there was all this life energy in the room being dedicated to healing workplace relationships so that groups could be more productive, retention could go up, training and retraining costs could go down, and the corporation would continue to survive and rape and pillage the planet.
And so my question was "Can capitalism be "healed?"
This led to some pretty interesting lunch conversations! I was surprised to find people who could engage the question genuinely, and I came to see some of them as smart and heartful people doing courageous work in the belly of the beast.
One of those consultants was a Black woman, and she spoke my own social justice language straight back to me. There she was, working inside corporations, telling me that as a white man there were rooms I could walk into that she never could. She was saying I could carry my activist spirit, my heart, my brains, and my skin into places that might be better for my being there. That's been tugging at me ever since.
On the third morning, sitting in meditation, it struck me that my ideas were just my ideas. One perspective out of three hundred at the conference. (And I had all those intensive grad school studies in global political and economic dynamics!) But did I know what the guy in front of me carried in his training and his life? Or the woman next to him? Even if mine happened to be the right one, what made me think I could really get anyone else to see things the way I did? That afternoon I took the microphone again and said my question had changed. No longer can capitalism be healed. Now: can I be healed?
That evening Peter Senge opened his keynote with the question I had just set down. I understood two things at once. I wasn't carrying it alone, and I was free to go work on the other one.
Here is what I took from all of it, and it's bigger than piano. There is no way any of us, individually, can figure out the problems we face. The solutions to our collective problems will come from the collective. So our real job as individuals is to learn to be more functional, more contributory parts of the whole.
That asks specific things of us. Deeper listening, so we can take in the perspectives of others and learn more about reality than any one of us can see alone. Clearer awareness of our own truth, so we can know what we actually have to offer. And honest, accurate expression, so the gifts we carry can be received and put to use. Listen. Feel. Play. The same three movements, at the scale of a whole society.
So this practice is about more than personal relief, more than personal healing, even more than personal enlightenment. It's about how each of those connects back to our natural relationship with the rest of reality. By giving yourself a few minutes a day to explore, enjoy, and even delight in navigating the unknown, you're building the capacity for a different relationship with power, with authority, with knowledge, and with the nature of reality itself.
What tends to happen either way
What tends to happen either way
Nothing falls apart all at once.
Nothing falls apart all at once.
When we stop listening to the signals telling us we're out of tune, nothing dramatic happens. Life keeps going. But quietly, the system compensates. We work harder to stay composed. We lean on things that numb or distract. We lower our expectations so things hurt a little less. Adaptation, though, isn't alignment. Joy narrows. Curiosity fades. A person can still perform well with less and less of themselves in it, and years can pass that way without anything ever becoming acute enough to address. That's the part that costs the most.
Left long enough, that can harden into cynicism, or a quiet resentment toward life for feeling smaller than it used to. This isn't a moral failure. It's just what happens when signals go unanswered.
It moves the other way about as quietly. The people I've worked with tend to describe the first real change as something small. A moment where they felt the sting and answered anyway, instead of firing. From outside it doesn't look like much. From inside it's the difference between being run by a moment and being in it.
I'll say plainly what it doesn't do. It doesn't remove grief, or illness, or a hard marriage, or a month with no money in it. Resistance is real, and mostly not conscious, so some weeks nothing yields at all. Nobody arrives. Every bit of integration turns out to reveal more terrain.
Signals don't disappear. They wait.
The case, in one line
The case, in one line
Reality is not going to become knowable, and none of us stops wanting to figure things out. What can change is that not knowing stops being a place to escape from and becomes a place it's possible to live.
The distance between running a half-step behind a life and being inside it, on time, is not a matter of knowing more. It's a matter of practice.
If this resonates
If this resonates
What matters most isn't whether you choose this work.
What matters most isn't whether you choose this work.
Whether you ever work with me or not, I'd encourage you to find some way to practice this. Any way that actually works for you. Not to fix yourself. Not to force a breakthrough. Just to keep bringing what you think, what you feel, what you say, and what you do into alignment, in real time, while it's happening.
That coherence nourishes a life, and it ripples outward in ways well beyond anything we can measure. I don't believe it's optional, and I don't believe it can be thought into existence. If you'd like to begin here, there's a door below. If not, I hope you find a practice that works for you. Either way, I wish you well.
If you'd like to try it
If you'd like to try it
The simplest place to begin is by listening. A short guided practice in responding through sound. No musical experience required.
This is here if it's useful. No application, no pressure. Just a door.
Not sure yet? Here is an honest look at whether this work is a fit for you.
You should never live in exile from your nature.
When you inhabit this practice, you won't.
PlayYourWay.us
You should never be exiled from your own nature.
