Circles

Over the years, I’ve incorporated the use of a certain concept to explain lines of thinking to students, and the line of thinking involves concentric circles. At the middle, most inner circle is you, and the things you can control about yourself - your tone, intonation, rhythmic and melodic accuracy, those sorts of things. In the next circle outwards, it incorporates the people on either side of you, and how you fit that first circle in to match with them - matching pitch, length, dynamics, etc. The further out you go, the more and more people become incorporated into your circle of listening - your section, your instrument family (brass, woodwind, string, percussion), the ensemble as a whole, and finally the audience and everyone that will be witness to the performance at that time. As I worked with this line of thought more and more, I realized that it’s not just applicable to music, but rather to a lot of different areas of life, including our own selves and our own well-beings. 

You see, everything starts from within. No matter what happens in life, whether it’s a good or a bad thing, the pure existence of it stems from a point of understanding that it only exists within our minds because we are there to experience it. Therefore, before everything else happens in the world, it happens within our minds. And yes, one could make the argument that I’m getting into the tree falling in the woods making a sound argument, but I believe that the logic stands - things are only in existence if there are other beings to experience that existence.

This linearity of mind creates a staircase of objectives for us, and part of those objectives are that we accept the realities that our minds create. I’ve found myself dwelling on this more and more (and unfortunately I think the circles my mind has been walking in has dug me into a sort of trench that I’m beginning to have problems getting myself out of, so that’s why I’m finally writing it down), analyzing experiences and situations, from the most grandiose circumstances that affect all of us like the Black Lives Matter movement and the Coronavirus, to the most menial of interactions, like the person driving too close behind me because I’m only driving one or two over the speed limit. How different are our worlds at that moment, between me and the person behind me? The juxtaposition of me, casually minding my own business and trying to take a moment out of the chaos of our world to enjoy the drive down a nice road on a cool summer evening, with the person behind me that I can see in my rearview mirror becoming increasingly agitated and driving increasingly closer to my Captain America license plate.

And all of this is contained within the first circle of our well-beings. And what I’ve come to realize over the years is that absolutely no one lives in the same world as anyone else, because our worlds are created by the experiences we have and the lessons we learn from the memories of our lives. I would even be willing to believe that if you had two people, from the moment they were born, live every waking moment together, that they would still not be in the same world together - that they would have memories of situations that differ ever so slightly, they have illnesses that they experience differently, they have preconceived genetic dispositions for one thing over another - no one lives in the same world as me. And no one lives in the same world as you. Our innermost circles are all unique.

So what now? How do we align ourselves with those closest to us? In the concentric circle analogy, the next circle out could contain the people that mean the most to us in our lives - our significant others, our best friends, and our closest family members. But just as no two instruments sound exactly the same, we have to figure out how to blend the tone and intonation of our own lives with the people on either side of us at any given moment. The level of which we do that can vary greatly, depending on how similar of circumstances you and I have had leading up to this point - maybe you’re a close friend of mine reading this, and you know a lot of the other inner workings of my mind, therefore you have a better idea of how to be receptive to these ideas, and our worlds have intertwined to a small but noticeable degree. Maybe this is the first time you’ve ever seen the words of my own thoughts, and we have absolutely nothing to do with each other outside of this sentence.

As we work our own minds outwards, and the circles grow increasingly larger, it allows more people to enter them - maybe the next circle includes good friends, distant family, and some meaningful co-workers. The next circle out includes the people that we know and associate with on a daily basis. The next circle out includes the people that we know and are aware of, but don’t necessarily have a day-to-day interaction with. The next circle out is our neighborhood, then our city, then our culture, then our society, then humanity as a whole. But keep in mind that none of that can be made into existence if we aren’t around to experience it. So we have to continually build on ourselves.

It’s tough to think outside of ourselves, because our own minds make up the majority of our own brains (duh). And so the second we begin to consider other people, our minds are at odds with the minds of everyone else that crosses our consciousness - or at least the other personalities that we have interpreted in our minds (how many times have you had a close friend or acquaintance that you really like, only to find out that someone else had different experiences with them, and doesn’t doesn’t view them favorably as a result?). So we have to shape and mold the puzzle pieces of our own lives that we share with others until they are somewhat capable of fitting into their own molded puzzle pieces. No one knows me the way I know me, because they only know the parts of me that I allow them to know. Contrarily, I can’t possibly know anyone else the way they know themselves. Until, that is, our perceptions of ourselves become flawed. Sometimes we need someone sitting next to us to tell us that we’re out of tune, or that our tone is bad.

And so there becomes this constant back and forth between our interactions with others, and our own idea of the ‘us’ that we’re putting out there. At the end of the day, though, if I’m not sure of the me, or I’m not confident in the me, or I’m insecure in the me that I allow others to experience, they’re not going to get to experience the me I’m hoping I radiate day in and day out. So I have to go back into my own innermost circle and work on the tone and intonation of my own life so that when others experience it, it’s a product that I know I can be proud of.

It’s just circles. And it starts with our own.