Take a breath…Do the thing. Repeat.
I recently listened to the great podcast series from Jad Abumrod about the musician and band leader Fela Kuti called Fear No Man. It’s a great podcast about a complicated person and if you love music, history or just great storytelling, you should check it out – it’s available on major podcast platforms. The first episode set up the series talking to a former band member, Bami Dele, who Fela had taken in after Bami Dele’s father was brutally murdered for not accepting a bribe from the corrupt Nigerian government.
This man was asked what his experience in Fela’s band meant to him. One of his comments was so incredibly powerful I had to turn the episode off and let it sink in.
If you’re unfamiliar with the music of Fela Kuti, it’s not a collection of songs so much as a collection of meditations featuring seemingly endless complex rhythms, passages, notes that can feel overwhelming if you’re used to 3 minute pop songs (even more so if you’re more into the 30 second clips on TikTok).
Bami Dele was a 17 year old boy learning how to play piano on his own and desperately wanted to play in Fela’s band. He had learned all of the piano parts for the songs Fela had released at that point and knew all the grooves. Eventually, Fela asked him to join the band as a pianist. Fela would demand that parts were played EXACTLY the same way, repeated for HOURS at times. If you made a small mistake in timing, volume or length of note, you were fined. Fines were large enough that if you were fined twice while playing a show, you went home without pay.
When asked how he could stand the pressure of playing for so long, with NO mistakes, the man simply said “You take a breath and play your part. Then you do it again – take a breath and play your part”. So simple – just breath and play your part. Ignore the complexities around you, they’re of no help to you. Ignore the worry about making a mistake, just get through this one repetition. After that, take a breath and get through the next one. Reduce the process down to a breath and an action.
What a beautiful idea – We can’t make the world around us less complex, less LOUD, less combative, less oppressive. But we can take a breath, do the thing we need to do to live our life true to our values and beliefs. And after we act, we take another breath. We don’t need to judge ourselves or worry about what people think of us, we just need to take a breath.
There is a healing power in taking a breath – taking in life, releasing worry and anxiety. There is healing power in action – in moving forward towards where we want to be.
The man in this story said that there was a place he would get to after repeating his part for so long where you move past boredom and to a place of understanding and acceptance of our own magnificent existence as part of the universe we live in – a place where trauma and pain, judgement and scorn, hate and rejection cannot touch our souls.
