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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #112 (Rhythms)

Published 3 months ago • 3 min read

1 Family Photo:
Rhythms of Life

Life is full of rhythms.

Daily rhythms: we wake up, eat breakfast, brush teeth. Weekly rhythms: workdays and weekends. Yearly and lifetime rhythms as the seasons change, as we change.

One joy of these last two years, of bouncing between Brazil and America, is getting to try on different rhythms in different countries. Deciding how we shape our days and weeks. Alternating cadences of shopping trips and social visits, the pitter-patter of trains on tracks.

It can be a struggle at times, learning new rhythms. We move and suddenly we're a half-beat ahead or a half-beat behind everyone else—it's hard to tell which. This isn't always bad.

​Syncopation adds flavor.

In the fall, Calvin will go to kindergarten. That will have its own patterns. For now, we're working out the rhythms of summer and our life here. We're making new friends, feeling how we fit into the interlocking parts of each other's routines.

1 Dad Joke:
Beats and Broccoli

Did you hear about the group of musicians who work at Panda Express?​
They're a wok band.
​
​*image by Dad[AI]Base​

Highlights:
Catch the Rhythm

​Music in Human Evolution by Kevin Simler​

Of all singing creatures, humans are the only ones who use rhythm.

​Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg (Derek Sivers Notes)​

Read aloud. The ear is smarter than the eye, if only because it’s also slower and because the eye can’t see rhythm or hear unwanted repetition. Read the words on the page as though they were meant to be spoken plainly. Catch the rhythm of the sentences without overemphasizing it. Read until your ear detects a problem - a subtle disturbance. Stop there.
​
Humans have a language instinct but not necessarily a writing instinct. The difference between talking and writing is the difference between breathing and singing well.

​How to tell great spoken stories by Julian Shapiro​

The ingredient that I noticed each of them employed was vocal rhythm. This is the art of varying your:
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- Speed
- Volume
- Enthusiasm
- Staccato and rhyme
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And most of all… vocal rhythm is the art of purposeful silence.
​
The more I listened to vocal variation, the clearer it became that spoken storytelling is a form of music. You talk. Then faster. You go silent. You strike with fast staccato sentences. Without vocal rhythm and pauses, you're just a human wall of text.
​
--
​
​‍Blowing your own mind entails being excited at moments of excitement, being shocked at moments of shock, and being wowed at moments of wonder. Listeners feed off this like sugar.
​
This, it turns out, is far more important than vocal rhythm or any other delivery trick.
​
This storytelling ingredient—blowing your own mind—made me realize that my treasure hunt was doomed to fail because I was looking for the byproducts of great storytelling. Things like vocal rhythm and so on. But it turns out that, by reliving experiences, your body captures all the great storytelling ingredients automatically: it knows how to vary vocal delivery, it knows when to pause, and it knows when to emphasize. Because when your mind relives emotions, your body reacts to them instinctively. You become walking cinema.

​Andrew Luck finally reveals why he walked away from the NFL by Seth Wickersham​

One day, while walking with Lucy in their neighborhood, Luck saw kids playing football. They knew who he was, and he knew that they knew. They asked him to throw. Luck threw a tiny ball to tiny targets. It rushed back to him, the motions and rhythms, but most of all, the purity of providing, of making people's day, just by delivering something into their hands. "I always had fun throwing," he says. And so he threw to those kids until it started raining, and Lucy was getting soaked, and it was time to go home.

iamJoshKnox Highlight:

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​iamJoshKnox​​

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Josh Knox

Hi! I am Josh Knox. Read more of me here: 👇

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