[SB 199] Renewing our rhythm
Discover more from Steady Beats | Matt Tillotson
Hi, I’m Matt. Welcome to Steady Beats, a newsletter about chasing the good life at midlife: exercise, education, and eighties music.
Friday night, I crashed into bed at 7:45pm.
(Living the wild life at 49, I know.)
As I’ve mentioned, we’re fighting a mental health battle in our family. Sometimes you take that turbulence head-on and come out the other side thinking you’re unaffected. Life continues. You sail on. We have stuff to do, after all.
But post-turbulence, often days later, fatigue sets in, forcing you to rest and recharge. The turbulence extracts the price you thought you avoided paying.
So, flopping into bed at Golden Hour, I flipped on the Sonos speaker to SiriusXM’s “80s on 8” and fell asleep.
Sometime after 11pm, I was pulled out of the haze of early slumber by a song’s repeating central element. I’d never noticed it before despite hearing the tune dozens of times over forty years.
Boooom boooom … boom-boom-boom-boom.
The speaker volume was just low enough, and the electric fan’s hypnotic just high enough, to erase all the other musical elements. Only the bass, synth, and drum machine, working in synchronized and relentless fashion, pushed through the darkness to revisit the song’s core touchstone over and over.
Boooom boooom … boom-boom-boom-boom.
The song was “Something About You” by Level 42, a mid-80s New Wave banger.
(In fact, the bassline is so good bassist Mark King’s thumb was once insured for 3 million British Pounds. )
“Something About You” wanders unevenly throughout its 4-minute, 25-second journey. Vocals echo in high and low pitches. Explorations and questions about love, unanswered, feel disheartening and threaten to pull the song’s energy down.
But then the song re-centers and renews itself on that same escalating six-beat touchstone.
Boooom boooom … boom-boom-boom-boom.
As I laid there listening to the recurring beat, I thought how important it is that I—that all of us—develop and protect the same thing in our own lives: habits that reset our energy and propel us forward.
For me, that’s jogging. Strength-training. Prayer. Writing this newsletter. Habits I return to over and over to build me back up, no matter where’s life’s quizzes and undulations lead.
When we cement our core habits, life’s highs and lows, its flourishes and failures, can’t pull us too far off our core rhythm. We’re restored, refreshed, and ready for whatever riddle presents itself next.
We can know it’s fine to go to bed at Golden Hour. The sun will shine again tomorrow, right in rhythm, right on time.
Thank you for reading.
Let’s keep the Steady Beats going. 💚
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[SB 199] Renewing our rhythm
Sorry to hear about the mental health issues in the family, they can be uniquely dispiriting and exhausting. I was listening to Juliette Greco when I read your post and clicked on the link. I’d say the hopeful connection you made between the bass line and the importance of steady, practical protocols to get us through the chaos is indicative of your fundamentally healthy, sound state of mind. And of course your insight is spot-on. We live life a breath at a time, and each inhale, and each exhale, although performing opposite functions, is a subtle pleasure. The pleasure and solace of each breath reveals the essential nature of the universe.
I'm a little late to the party, so to speak, and really have no core habits (loooong story, and really boring) - what's the best way to start for a serial quitter who has the attention span of a lab rat and wants to quit procrastinating in a couple of months or whenever?
Also, I may need help with run on sentences...and punctuation ..