The Tuning Fork
Psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist has said that the music is the space between the notes. The music is not the notes themselves. This isn’t a trivial statement.
If we hope to make any sense of the paltry lives we are scattered into, it only arises by recognizing the relationships between the notes of our lives.
As a child, I was fascinated by the tuning fork’s ability - when tapped on a solid surface - to create vibrations and evoke energy not only in the next door part of the fork but in all the spaces immediately adjacent. How does it do that? It’s magic.
It isn’t magic. It’s how this majestic Universe runs. We just can’t see it. It’s as though we see the tuning fork with only one prong.
Whatever your view of spirituality (not religion), it is the connections we form in our lives with our bodies, the people near us, our animals, all things material and non-material, that gives meaning and pleasure.
Anything else is just a one-pronged tuning fork. Or, as McGilchrist says, it’s the notes minus the space between them. It’s not music. It’s not alive.
For things to be alive, they are interacting, experiencing friction, harmony, expansion, contraction, birth, and death. It ia always ongoing.
Physicist Carlo Rovelli lyrically writes the following in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics:
For now, this is what we know of matter: A handful of types of elementary particles, which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and nonexistence and swarm in space, even when it seems that there is nothing there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies; of the innumerable stars; of sunlight; of mountains, woods, and fields of grain; of the smiling faces of the young at parties; and of the night sky studded with stars.
Whatever else you seek, look for what’s alive, for the invisible space between the notes. That’s where you’ll find the music.