Where Am I Forcing The Ball?

I came to soccer late — in my forties, which is an undignified age to fall in love with something. I fell hard anyway.

What got me wasn’t the goals. It was the twenty seconds before a goal, where nothing happens, and the ball moves sideways, and then sideways again, and a gap opens that was not there four passes ago.

The gap was made by the sideways passes. That’s the whole thing.

The most beautiful passing team I have ever watched is the 2014 Spurs, which is not a soccer team, and I will take that argument any time you like. Same principle though. The extra pass. Nobody forcing it. The shot arrives because five people declined to take a worse one.

I think about this constantly at the drums, and lately more about work than about playing.

Because the failure mode is identical. When a groove isn’t landing, the instinct is to add — more notes, more fills, more information. When a project isn’t moving, the instinct is to add — more hours, more tabs, one more thing to the week. In both cases you are forcing the ball, and in both cases the reason it isn’t working is that there’s no space for it to work in.

The notes you don’t play are what make the ones you do play land. Everybody agrees with that sentence and almost nobody plays like it’s true, myself very much included.

Space is also the hardest thing to teach. I can teach a student to play faster. I can teach them to play cleaner. Teaching a chamber group to wait — to let a phrase sit, to trust that the silence is doing something — takes a whole semester and sometimes doesn’t take at all.

So the question I’ve been asking myself on Monday mornings this fall isn’t what should I add. It’s where am I forcing the ball.

Usually there’s an obvious answer, and usually it’s the thing I’ve been pushing hardest.

Rest isn’t the reward for the work. It’s part of the work, in the same way the sideways pass is part of the goal.