The Breath of My Violin

By Anon / Spring 2026

My violin teacher put down her bow in the middle of the lesson. “Slow down,” she said. “You're playing as if the music might run away.”

I stopped. My fingers were cramped from trying to squeeze every possible scale into the hour. I am surprised at what she says, as achieving Paganini’s speed – something faster than human – should be the goal of practicing. I nod as if I understand and try to slow down. However, after a few notes, I could not help but subconsciously get faster as I play. To be honest, I enjoyed my fingers blur into one, and for me, slowing down feels like failure. Although I have my teacher’s words in my mind, my fingers still run uncontrollably faster than my conscious. 

After I play through the passage fluently again, my teacher puts down her violin. She picked up a pencil and drew my attention to the sheet music. “See all these rests and breaths?” she said. “They are also part of the music. Sometimes when people play, they want to complete it, as if success only comes at the moment when it’s finished flawlessly. But in that way, your mind is living in the future. Then you cannot really enter the flow of the present moment. When that happens, you are not truly engaged with the notes you are playing, which means you cannot fully bring the music alive or achieve the success you want.”

What my teacher said struck me. I never really heard the silence, or maybe even the notes in the present – I only chased the next one. That night, I laid awake thinking about time. I had always imagined it as something that marched forward whether I was ready or not. Thus, I tried to chase it – with more repetitions, pieces, and more notes packed in a limited time. However, for the first time, my teacher pointed out another way to look at time: the future is not something we can reach by moving faster. It only arrives through attention to the present.

That night, this shift in view gradually melts the anxiety that has always pushed me forward. I wondered: what other ways can we experience time, instead of being drowned in that ever-rolling stream?

I found the answer at a volunteer activity in a nursing home. During the activity, I sat beside an elderly woman of medium height with long, straight hair. She seemed to be friendly to me, and soon we started to chat. “I have two daughters. One works abroad, and the other visits often.” “Ah, how lovely”. I replied.

We talked about something else, and then I left for a while. When I came back, she was still smiling – kind and friendly. “I have two daughters”. She said to me. “One works abroad, and the other visits often.”

When I came around, she had already repeated half of the story she told before, with the same brightness in her voice. I sat and listened, reacting with surprise and curiosity, as if I were hearing it for the first time, with a sadness in my heart. Her time was like a loop, circulating between forgetting and remembering. Each cycle refreshes with her daughter’s face re-emerging from the fog, just like a lighthouse through the mist. It is likely to be love, memories, or the thread that holds a life together when all the clocks have stopped.

Across the room, a man with a bandaged leg hurried to find a place he needed to reach. It is a destination none of us could name. His nurse told me that every day he talks to himself, muttering the names of some places. The night before, he had even tried to escape his bed to walk there. I tried to put myself in his shoes. His time was not a line or a loop, but a rope thrown backward into the past. His eyes held the color of old photographs: sepia and blue, which faded at the edges and burned at the center.

At that moment, I sat very still.

My time had always leaned toward the future, toward the next version of myself that might finally be enough. However, these elders had given their time back to the past. Still, love, meaning, and a kind of clarity remained. In that moment, I thought of my violin – the hours trying to outrun the metronome, treating each note as something to conquer rather than something to hold.

That night I returned to the practice room.

The sun tipped the world into amber. I raised my bow. Instead of lunging into the first phrase, I just drew the bow across the open D string. In that moment, when time seemed to cease to exist, I finally heard the breath of my violin. Then, the music flowed.