I started playing clarinet in fourth grade, and dabbled in other instruments.. I never stopped entirely, but I took years-long breaks from playing music.

Earlier this year, I picked up a new instrument while I was very sick. I got a wind synth, the Roland AE-20. It was a somewhat impulsive purchase, in the moment, but I'd been wanting one for a while—the question was just when.

Getting back into music at this particular moment felt... irresponsible. I was having trouble working, or even walking around our block. Yet there was this magnetic pull toward this instrument, toward making music again. Music pulled me back in my hardest hour.

Almost immediately, it helped me move through my illness. When my heart rate shot up, playing scales and simple melodies could rein it in. When I couldn't calm down, playing long tones and scales and silly sounds would make me feel better. And the entire recovery process was helped by having a small low-stakes goal, like learning a simple Bach piece.

As I progressed through my recovery, I had a few moments where things clicked into place for me. One day I suddenly connected the fingerings to those of the clarinet, and was able to play much more fluently. Another day, I'd figure out the phrasing of one of the pieces I was working on.

But I struggled with a lot of the things that I struggled with before: rhythms, expression, you know... music. I want to express myself better through playing and, eventually, composing music. If I wanted to get there, I'd need a teacher.

I found a teacher through a piano teacher in town. I asked if she knew any saxophone teachers, since my instrument uses sax fingerings, especially someone who also plays jazz. She connected me with Charles, a local musician who's served as principal clarinet in some esteemed ensembles. So I reached out, asking him if he'd teach me on this unusual instrument.

Charles teaches clarinet and saxophone, not wind synth. I'm the first student he's had who uses an amplifier. But the instrument uses sax fingerings, and it responds to breath the way an acoustic woodwind does, so he figured he can probably help me. We decided to try it.

Right away, his method started shaping how I approach music, for the better. He's not focused too much on the specific instrument, but on the rhythm and expression you're putting through it. Obviously the instrument itself matters, but not as much as I'd once thought. I have improved my technique, but not at the cost of expressivity, and I'm losing the mechanical approach I used to take.

He had me buy a few books. I got the Rubank Elementary Method for saxophone, which we're working through to shore up my fundamentals and build on expression. It's going much faster than when I worked through the same volumes for clarinet in school. I picked up a staff paper notebook so he can write out exercises for me. And he had me pick up Robert Starer's Rhythmic Training. That book has been the cornerstone of our work together and has challenged me, showed me I can learn hard things that feel impossible, and fundamentally altered how I look at my art and writing.

At the same time I started working with Charles, I was in a writing class from Corporeal Writing. It was tremendously challenging for me, and I took it based on a friend's recommendation. The basis of the class is to write from your body, not your brain. I'm positive I don't understand a lot of things from the class still, but it showed me a different way of writing.

In school, my approach to writing was fact-based. For non-fiction, I'd lay out all the facts in my head, or the chronological storyline. Then I'd write that in some narrative, mapping out the logical ordering. It ended up... technical. And fiction took a similar approach, just that the facts and story were things I came up with. But anything nonlinear, or imagery that's not literal, evaded me.

The first week of my class put cracks in that for me. By the end, it had completely opened up the possibilities in my writing.

Our first prompt was challenging for me to understand. But I embraced that difficulty and sat with it, listening to my body, writing what came to me and what I felt from the prompt instead of what I thought it meant. That process was difficult and, at times, painful. The first assigment brought me to places from my past that I'd pushed down. I cried from the act of writing.

That never happened before.

By the end of the class, I was able to produce imagery that made my classmates feel things, instead of think them. I could write from my feelings. It didn't get less painful, so it's not something I can do all the time—but that it's possible is not something I knew at all.

At our first or second lesson, we started working through the rhythm book. The first section we focused on features syncopation. My stomach dropped when we got there, since this is something I've always had trouble with.

But in the week after that lesson, I got to where I could feel a syncopated beat for the first time. I've played them before, but it never felt natural and it was often from following someone else's cues. The practice I did let me get to where I can produce syncopation reliably.

The feeling was intoxicating. The moment that syncopation embedded itself into my brain, I filled with warmth and confidence. I relaxed. I couldn't stop doing those exercises, to feel that again.

And so the next challenge arrived: triplets. This was, yet again, one that I have long struggled with. It's a rhythm that's very common to have trouble with. But this time, unlike syncopation? This time, I knew I could do it. I just had to put in the time.

Triplets took me longer to get than syncopation. The glimmers were there, and in our first session working on triplets he got me to produce a 3:2 polyrhythm once! Oh, that feeling. I chased that feeling for the following week. But I wasn't getting it, I was really struggling. No matter what I did, I couldn't figure it out.

I'd think about where the beat is, what the subdivisions are, and I'd still keep missing it. By the time I had thought the subdivision, it was gone, and I was late. Or I'd anticipate it coming, and I was early. I can analyze the rhythm, but playing it was beyond me.

The next week, Charles talked to me about feeling the beat in my head. Some people do this with counting in their head: one two three four. They subdivide eights with one and two and three and four and, and triplets with something like one and a two and a or one trip let two trip let. Other people feel a pulse for the beat.

I've tried to count in my head, and I can do it when I'm listening to music. But I can't do it when I'm playing; the act of counting as words seems to force out everything else. A pulse, though... that I feel. The pulse I feel lives a few inches above and behind my head. I can't describe what it feels like except that I know it's there, and it's somehow located in space, but it's not a sound. The closest I can come is that it's like something is squeezing on each beat and subdivision, except it's squeezing something that's not inside me.

This doesn't happen to me every time, and if I think about the pulse that's there, it can go away. If I try to peek at it, try to force everything onto it, then it's gone. I was trying to do an exercise and Charles stopped me, and then started telling me a story that was related. But while he did that, the metronome was still going. The pulse in my head continued, got stronger.

I interrupted him to do the exercise. I nailed it.

"What changed?" he asked, with a smile on his face.

I told him that I stopped thinking about the exercise. Instead, I let myself just feel the pulse, and feel where I needed to be. And it worked.

Since that lesson, I've kept working on this and have gotten better at summoning the pulse, at feeling instead of thinking. Don't get me wrong: I need to think about the rhythms to understand them before I can play them. And I certainly need to think about the mistakes I've made so I can understand them to fix them the next time I do that. But the core is to feel when I do things, instead of analyzing.

This turns out to be much broader than music and creative writing for me. It is an approach that is more fundamental than that.

This blog post itself is an example of that. When I started writing it, I knew mostly that it would talk about triplets and the pulse and feeling and thinking, but I didn't know what the story was. I didn't have an outline. But I let myself feel where it starts, where it takes twists and turns, and where it ends up.

This comes up in how I understand myself. Instead of purely analyzing things, I can sit with the feelings and... feel them. It's always hard, and sometimes it's scary. And it never feels like something is happening, but yet, later, I have a deeper understanding of things. I don't see the feelings, but feeling them brings some clarity. Sometimes.

And it even comes up in software design decisions and in writing code. You have to vibe with it sometimes and go with feelings. We have standard words for this, like "code smell," which are very much related to feelings but couched in a less feelings-sounding veneer.

I layer in both approaches together. I need to think about problems in order to load them into my head and solve them. But I also need to feel problems in order to solve them well.

Thinking can be great for figuring out what we want to do. But actually doing it? That's when it's important to feel, not think.

Thank you to Erika and Robbie for feedback on a draft of this post.