When I started playing, I filled everything.
Every gap felt like a mistake.
Every silence felt like I’d forgotten to do something.
So I played more notes, faster, louder,
terrified of the quiet.
It took me years to understand
that the quiet was the point.
An old player told me once:
“The rest is a note too.
You’re just choosing not to play it.”
I didn’t get it then. I do now.
The space between two notes
is what lets you hear them both.
Take it away and you don’t get more music.
You get a wall of sound
where nothing stands out.
Learning to leave space
was scarier than learning to play fast.
Fast is just work.
Space is trust —
believing that less will land harder,
that the room you leave
is doing something the notes can’t.
And I’ve found the same thing everywhere since.
The sentence I cut.
The feature I didn’t build.
The point I let sit
instead of over-explaining.
I used to fill the silence because it scared me.
Now I leave it on purpose,
and let what’s around it breathe.
That’s when it finally started sounding like music.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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