One of the earliest experiences I had with feeling conscious emotion was listening to Frederic Chopin’s piano music as a 3-year-old in Beijing. This external experience unlocked an internal response. The way he allowed a note to linger was sweeter than chocolate, and it became a metaphor for life: We can't hold on to our loved ones or the illusion of safety and certainty, but we can allow a special moment to resonate, even when we know it will fade.
Chopin's harmonies encourage patience in the midst of tension.
As I have been processing the aftermath of the pandemic, three recurring fears come up in conversations: feeling overwhelmed and inadequate for increasingly complex challenges, grieving the inevitable fading away of our loved ones, and experiencing collective disconnection as exhaustion becomes the new norm.
As a pianist, I choose either to lean into the peak of a phrase by playing louder and anticipating the beat or to give it space. The parallel in life is that I can name my fear to highlight it or be curious about the context surrounding it. Fears can prompt us to consider the bigger direction and take action in a wide spectrum of ways; it does not have to force us into fast, half-baked decision-making.
Conscious Listening for Conscious Living
Chopin's long, drawn-out pauses and unresolved chords are not just waiting for a resolution—they contain the joy of existence without either anticipating or dreading what comes next. The life parallel here is that rather than rushing to the next event or becoming overly vigilant, we can let our emotions inform how we pace the timing around life events.
The skill of holding and releasing tension actually enriches both listening and living. Certain initiatives warrant incredibly long spans of tension so that when the resolution arrives, it carries maximum impact. By mentally holding on to the tension, we can understand the structures and relationships around it. Unlike a runner pacing to physically beat a time record, a conscious listener paces emotionally to pursue deeper meaning.
The beauty of Chopin’s music takes us on a journey full of emotional twists and turns, with waves of renewal and transformation. While we may not be able to escape unpleasant emotions—whether it’s fear, grief, or frustration—we can find a little more stamina to get through to the other side, over and over again. Whatever music or life turns out to be, there will be a closure in its own time.
A Lack of Punctuation in Life Leads to Fragmented Attention
As I speak to my piano intensive class about the importance of "punctuation" in classical music, we gain awareness of the moments of pause, silence, and space that allow us to digest what has just come before and prepare for what is to come. This punctuation creates boundaries and structure that protect our capacity to make sense of things.
Focus with punctuation fuels our productivity and improves our learning process, though it has become increasingly rare in our age of fragmented information. Social media and news outlets feed us bite-sized fragments of news and entertainment, and we forget how to integrate loose ends back into a larger narrative. These dissonant moments are like the free radicals blotching our skin imperceptibly day by day.
Social media—designed to keep us constantly engaged and reactive—has done quite the job of obliterating our attention span and taking away our agency. "The Social Dilemma" explains how 24/7 marketing and a confusion over “reality TV/media versus private life” boundary are pushing the speed of stimulation and response ever faster to a short circuit. We have created an environment that makes it hard to adjust our speed.
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Refining Our Nervous System by Stretching the Moment
What if we could slow down? What if we could approach life with the same elegance and awareness of Chopin’s compositions? His emotional agility to stretch out a dissonance over a long span of time offers a lesson in pacing.
In practical terms, this may be to perceive the dissonances in our life more thoughtfully, before rushing to fix them. Or savoring simple pleasures and the people we may take for granted. Or appreciating new solutions and umbrella concepts before retreating to what’s familiar. We can approach our lives with what I call "artistic intelligence," the ability to discern how to pursue personal meaning in a complex situation.
Conclusion: The Power of Collective Harmony
Pacing a conscious life requires us to cultivate mindfulness, embrace complexity, and have fun with creative associations. These are the foundations of what I call my "conscious listening" approach to music, and they transfer into conscious living. Joining music classes and adult chamber music groups can help motivate us to cultivate awareness for the daring variety of pacing that gives Chopin’s music its sense of emotional agency.
The time to discover our emotions, our desires, and our fears is right now. Maybe listening to Chopin will help awaken the unconscious parts of us that can sense and feel before we act. Let’s take that first step toward reclaiming our agency from the many forces that seek to manipulate and overwhelm.
