The Beat of the Drum

 The Beat of the Drum

By Bobby Neal Winters

Listen to the wind blow,

Watch the Sun rise.

--Fleetwood Mac

I am not a musician.  When I talk about it, it is like a eunuch discussing sex: ever the observer. But here goes.  One day while listening to Fleetwood Mac’s song The Chain.  The music is all about that drum beat.  There is a single rhythmic pounding.  I guess the drummer has a pedal that he uses to create a rhythm on his bass drum.

The rest of the musicians come in and play their parts around that. They have to be in time with each other or they might step on each other's notes as it were.  In this way they are like dancers, they don’t want to bump into each other or it is disaster. 

Building an active life is something like that.  There has to be a bass drum beating somewhere to create the rhythm, to create a structure to build everything else around.  We all benefit to a certain degree from the 7-day cycle we call the week, but I do more so because church provides my bass drum. Even in the days when I only did Sunday School, even during the lockdown when I only did online Bible study, the weekly visit with others who seek God helped me keep it all together, helped me keep a calibration on time.

Others have different ways.  They’ve got their own bass drums.

Once you’ve got that established, you can start working-in other things.  You can set up a daily routine.  Just as they play the notes on the banjo between the beats of the drum, you can run through your days.

These days I am up early with stretching, shaving, making hot tea, eating breakfast, studying Spanish (and French), and then off to work.  Work is less predictable.  Ten years ago I thought of myself as being like Christopher Robin in a Winnie the Pooh book; these days I am more like Liz Lemon in 30 Rock. Then I come home, take a walk, eat dinner, watch some TV, stretch, and to bed.

Thus we cycle: “Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”  But that is okay. Every day is part of the song; every day is a note vibrating on a string.

The weeks stack up and the song changes.  We progress through the year: winter yields to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall. We complete a circle. So I look back to that previous sentence and as if “progress” is the right word if we just circle back to where we were before.  And I have to say yes.  Just like singing a new hymn.  On the first verse, we might be tentative; on the second verse we are stronger; by the third verse, we’ve got it, especially if it is a good chorus.

“I can still hear you saying you would never break the Chain.” (Not a hymn I admit, but thanks for your forbearance.)

Our life is a song we sing.  Gordon Lightfoot would say, “The song that you sing should not be too sad and be sure not to sing it too slow.”

But you have to have the beat of the drum to tie it all together, to pace it all out.  You have to have something to weave your melody around.  What is your foundation?

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )