I know days like these, with every fiber of my being. The details are unclear, but it will be a good day. Not because I wish it to be so, but because sometimes days are good.

Most days contain mysteries, and it is hard to know exactly what will be revealed. Every day an adventure! Other days promise resolution, or at the very least exposition. Oftentimes they don’t deliver on their promise, but they are days where one can wake up and truthfully say, eyes clear, “Today, something will happen.”

These days are the downbeats. They are the beginning of bars, both the start of something new and a direct result of what came before. Everything before creates the energy, the drive to them, and everything after shimmers with the aftereffects. One can’t place a downbeat out of context; it is made special only by its relationships and placement.

This is a mystery of music. Every bar is in itself a reproduction in miniature of the cycles which make up our lives. The explosion of harvest; the lull of winter; the promise of spring; the anticipation of summer, yielding again to another harvest. 1 2 3 4, and 1 again. Every four beats, a lifetime.

Of course, life isn’t in many ways as predictable as that; harvests go bad, winters are mild, accidents happen. But on the wide view, these are ripples, twists that reinforce the regularity of the cycles rather than deny them. So it is with music; syncopations and other rhythmic and harmonic elements serve to break the predictability of the cycle, while at the same time reinforcing it. Even in music which has no regularity, the human ear generally works very hard at imposing them anyway. We are creatures of cycle, and the things we create reflect us, just as we reflect those things that nurtured us.

This is, of course, very long winded rumination, but it is days like this that cause me to reflect on exactly why it is good, and why I deserve these things when there is so much going on in the world and in my life that would perhaps suggest otherwise.