Short Answer is No

No is the answer.

Junior is sharing with me his latest adventure into the magic of the music world. We are into our floor routine, four-way planks and stretching, when he plays a creative card announcing he has discovered a cool four-chord progression on the guitar. 

Outstanding is my abbreviated reply as I try to relax my quivering core. Is there a minor in there somewhere? 

His response tells me that there is, along with a ‘how did you know’ exhale. Well, I begin, knowing that if we are to wring maximum value from our brief morning allotment of workout time we must focus on this - and not that. Hundreds if not thousands of pop songs were built with the architectural framework known in the trade as a three-chord progression, typically in the I - IV - V format, so a natural variation is to add a minor or a seventh for variety or spice. Is it an A-minor? 

Again the exhale guffawed yes.

Perhaps tired of me already knowing the answers to his recent discoveries, he modulates with another question as we segue into leg lifts, and being a gifted mathematician, he tries to frame the question with more binary possibility than philosophical certainty. He asks, ‘As I was playing around with those chords I was wondering if we (humanity) will ever run out of music.’ 

I quickly tell him the story of a road trip I once took with a very gifted musician. We were in my 1948 Chevy half-ton heading South on 101 about midway between San Francisco and LA. We were cruising along trying to nail the two part harmony of John Denver’s cool but corny 'Sunshine on My Shoulders’, and I JUST COULD NOT GET IT RIGHT. The last note  (in Am7) simply wasn’t within reach of my very limited vocal range or acumen. Rudy and I took a break to stretch our legs on the beach at Pismo and looking skyward I asked him the same question that Junior had just asked me. His answer was surprisingly quick: 

No.

Never? Never. Not no how and not no way? Not no how and not no way. 

Because it is all a variation on a theme. And following universal cosmic reality, subject to change, and if one changes a part of the whole, one has changed the whole. Take a note - like the one you couldn't hit - any note or any chord and augment it, diminish it, move it to another key or time signature, add the poetic song in your heart and practice it until your fingers bleed. You will find that you cannot ever play it the same way twice. When the last rendition is perfect, it was vastly different from its original, even if the melody and mood remain the same. That is why no two baseball games are ever the same, or, as Zen tells us, we can never step into the same river twice. A song played perfect is not the same as the same song played imperfect. One might even say that the possibilities and variants are infinite. 

All we can do, in music, in health and fitness, in sports, or as in the amalgam of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, is to seek improvement, discipline ourselves to relentless practice and play the music our souls suggest. Music is life. Sing your song. Practice the presentation. Explore. Share it with others. Love the process. Up your vibration. 

And never worry about running the tank to empty. You won’t as long as you keep moving in that direction. The only variable is of quality and the short answer is no. 

Yes?