Echo

“With these words, I drop my pebble into the eternal pond of time.”

With over a year spent learning the electric guitar, I’ve picked up a few things that have made me think differently about the world of music. There’s something unique and powerful about the way music theory and composition works, as well as th mind set required to unlock certain elements of playing.

Last night, I found myself mentally fingering my fretboard, thinking about the position of each note, as well as the structure of each scale.

What most people don’t know about music is that it’s little more than a mathematical equation. Each chord structure is composed of the identical number/variation of whole and half steps, which simply express themselves as you move up each note on the piano, guitar or any other musical instrument.

To move a proverbial (yes, I said it) whole step up the keyboard, I think there are some similarities between music composition and writing.

Similar to different instruments, there are a lot of different formats for writing. A press release has a structure wholly different than a haiku, or a blog.

When I write, there’s a part of me that remembers these words will live beyond me. I hope that someday Atlas reads them and discovers a new way of understanding his father, similar to the way I read the book Opa wrote us.

That book helped me understand myself in ways that I continue to unpack. As a young man, it guided me through the days of adventure, as well as pain. As a Father, it now guides me through the unique journey one finds as they become a parent.

This afternoon, I sat down with Atlas and I showed him a few videos from the last decade of my life. He watched me surf, deadlift 495lb and swim in the open ocean with a shark. The look on his face when he saw these videos was indescribable.

What we do in life matters. A lot. The crumbs of ourselves that we leave behind are always picked up by somebody. I think Opa knew what he was doing when he wrote his book. He wasn’t leaving behind a crumb; he was leaving behind a treasure chest, filled with the kind of wisdom that takes a lifetime to obtain.