In these mid-fifties years, I’ve sometimes wondered if lowering your expectations is the key to life? Seriously. It certainly doesn’t feel to me that life is getting easier. My energy levels aren’t on an upward arc. I wish I could say so, but I don’t think I’ve upped my game lately. Neither are my chances favorable for getting through a week without finding myself lying awake at 3 a.m., worried about the complicated adult issues facing our three children in college. I can’t fix things for them anymore. Then there’s the tuition payments. Who, these days, is optimistic about the direction of the world, especially if you pay much attention to newspaper headlines? With the passing of each year I have more questions and less answers. Considering all this, it’s not a hard case to make, that of lowering expectations.

And yet, as I keep learning how to adjust to reality, I still find a hard, resilient little kernel of something deep inside of me that gets me out of bed every morning. It doesn’t want to quit. I have sometimes referred to it in the past with the letters h-o-p-e. I recognize that this word has a fairy-tale feel to us realists. Wherever it’s actually located (I still think of my chest rather than my head), I don’t think I possess any special virtue. Is it simply a side effect of the naive optimism I soaked up as the son of 1960’s white, middle-class, midwestern America? I think there’s more to it than that.

My hypothesis is that this never give up piece of us is a human inheritance. In saying so, I’m not meaning to marginalize the experience of dear friends who, in the midst of the dark tunnel of depression, lost touch with this resilience. As I contemplate my daily experience, what I actually taste is anxiety and hope, side by side. They flicker on and off from one moment to the next, depending on whatever thought I happen to be grasping at.

That thought brings to mind a talk I gave a few months ago as I was explaining to some of my music students the meaning of the Blues. I’m a Jazz musician and educator. We were focusing on the question of harmony, and specifically, the dominant 7th chord. For those who’ve yet to study music theory, a chord is a collection of notes sounded together simultaneously. The dominant 7th chord is made from a major triad—a happy-sounding group of three notes, C-E-G—plus a B-flat on top. The B-flat changes the character of the entire chord, from a consonant one (a resolved feeling) to a dissonant one (a not resolved feeling). It’s the relationship between E and B-flat that creates the tension. That interval is called a “tritone.” It wants to move inwardly by a half-step from both notes, creating a more pleasant, peaceful-sounding major third, as the E slides up to F, and the B-flat slides down to A. After the resolution everyone lets out a sigh of relief.

The Blues was the first music in the history of Western culture (think Rome, not Dallas) that left dominant 7th chords unresolved. In fact, the classic Blues musical form is made up entirely of dominant 7th chords. African American musicians and listeners found realism in it. It was a way of saying to everybody their truth: we live in an unresolved world. Rather than sugarcoat reality in their music, all the great Blues and Jazz musicians, from Robert Johnson, to Bessie Smith, to Louis Armstrong, to Duke Ellington, to Charlie Parker, told life like it was. My days, too, feel more like a dominant 7th chord than they do a major triad. How about yours?

And yet, through their songs, these human beings told another truth. To live amidst dissonance, to bear its unresolved tension, and to keep singing – maybe that is what it means to live in hope. It’s not really a question of lowering of expectations. It’s a deepening of them.

JKG. March 2018

Photo by Chris Bair on Unsplash