Moment’s Notice
About twenty years ago, sometime after Mario Lemieux retired from professional hockey, I was watching a TV biography about that remarkable athlete. The interviewer asked Le Magnifique how, faced with a breakaway, one-on-one against the opposing goaltender, he simply never missed. The essence of his reply, paraphrased as best as I recall, has stayed with me all these years later. Most aspects of hockey –– defensive positioning, battling opponents for puck possession, setting up the Penguins’ offense with deft passing –– are hard work but, alone in on a breakaway, “when time slows down,” Lemieux said, it was easy to slip the puck past the goalie and score.
Lemieux made the statement as if it were completely obvious that, under certain conditions, one’s sense of time changes, making herculean tasks much easier. The observation struck me then and has stuck with me ever since due to comparable, but far less common and therefore more enigmatic, experiences in my own life. How I still remember, the few times I hit a home run at youth-league baseball, the remarkably slow, clear, altogether manageable trajectory of those pitches. I still see them like volleyballs lobbed my way these thirty-five years later.
How, in my principal work as an improvising musician, during that memorable concert in Mexico City a few years ago by our duo, Amber, I could so radiantly hear every detail and every sequential logic in the playing of the quicksilver clarinettist Lori Freedman. I could also respond and provoke by producing exactly the sound I had in mind on the trombone. Every sound seemed both predetermined, almost scored, and so deliberately invented, by her, by me, by us together.
How one formative sexual encounter opened new vistas and time-feels of experience, which compunction restrains me from describing here. You catch my drift.
The concept of “flow states” has lived in popular consciousness since the 1970s through the work of psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and those it has inspired. The origin of Csíkszentmihályi’s research is widely known; he was fascinated by painters as they grew absorbed in their work, ‘got in the zone.’ Afterward, subjects would commonly report how their sense of time was altered, a defining flow state trait. Clearly, Mario Lemieux was adept at accessing the state under the right, goal-seeking conditions, and I too have had a few such moments under other conditions, and they strike me as some of my peak moments. He shoots, he scores.
A cliché and a truism that seem to be at odds with one another: “Live in the moment” and “I can’t pay attention the way I used to.” There is certainly a siege upon our attention spans, a blizzard of pings and alerts that lure us away from tasks we’ve declared to be important, to ourselves and sometimes to the world. Each intrusive text message or social media notification takes just a moment to consume, but up to twenty minutes to metabolise as we seek to regain focus on priority tasks, desperate for the time-altering flow that makes their execution so satisfying. It is the melding of the self with the activity, the stringing together of generative moments so that they really start to live. Each morning, I open the little guided meditation app for my ten-minute session as a kind of prophylaxis against these distractions, a seemingly noble but mostly futile intervention as my focus flounders halfway through these sentences as I struggle to compose them.
As I think more about the battle between in-the-moment focus and a waning attention span, I should probably sharpen some definitions. There are certainly different kinds of attention, including the broad categories of ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ attention. The former functions as a kind of spotlight, one that lets me exclude myriad sensory information so that I can focus on the (this!) task at hand. The latter is the scanning of the entire sensory environment for signs of danger or opportunity; in my tent in the Canadian backcountry, I’m suddenly attentive to a nocturnal sound provoking the anxious question, “is that a bear?” One can readily imagine the positive and complementary contributions both types have made throughout human evolution.
Considering this rough, though not un-useful, distinction, how then might we define ‘a moment’ such that we can (revelling in the cliché) consider living in one, or many? From my own piecemeal flow-state anecdotes above, what emerges is the experience (through top-down attention) of a sequence of conjoined, coherent moments: I hold the bat, poised; the pitcher throws; I see the ball so clearly; I swing; the ball pings off the metal bat, lofting high and far. Each moment is a discrete point along a wave of experience, there to be graphed or described in language if needed, but primarily experienced as a flowing whole, a longer, more textured uber-moment. (I think of a former lover with whom I’d occasionally visit the Long Point beach in southwestern Ontario; “but a Long Point is a line,” she’d tease me every time.) In the quotidian, though, one’s flow-line momentum is readily distracted by the momentary new information (*ping*) that captures our scanning, bottom-up attention. Indeed, our brains have adapted to conditions going back tens of thousands of years, and, if it’s our top-down attention spans that suffer in the current informational climate, it’s because the bottom-up is hijacked by, in the context of eons of human experience, novel elements produced by those who seek to profit from our attention. Every Instagram notification is the sound of a bear, my spotlight be damned, Meta’s stock-price be exalted, and “living in the moment” becomes a state of constant distraction.
What to do to stave off the hijackers? I don’t know the psychology, but I’ve been reflecting on what it might mean to conceive of, and to experience, ‘a moment’ as something longer than what we’re used to. Longer… or larger, more ample: The appropriate wave-resonance of an amplitude that can confound the oppositional logic that says I can attend either to momentum or to the momentary. It’s no surprise that the site that feels most germane here is music-making. For one, how is it that I can create my own steady stream of trombone music while listening to Lori on clarinet doing something similar? And, even more remarkably, how is it possible that these streams can merge, converge, and diverge in imaginative ways? This intersubjective, collaborative attentiveness strikes me as a very different experience than a single-minded flow-state activity like those of a painter in her zone, Mario Lemieux on a breakaway, and (in rare, precious moments) the writer writing this text.
When Amber plays, I hear what Lori’s up to and, vitally, I’m regularly surprised by what I hear. Indeed, it will provoke me to change what I’m doing, but this is not a distraction; it doesn’t draw my focus away from what I’m doing. What happens suddenly, momentarily, is absorbed into the flow of just-happened, happening, and will-happen, and there’s a dissolution of the membrane that normally separates sense-of-selves and activity. Somehow, just maybe, my spotlight (on what I’m doing) and my scanner (on what she’s doing) are attending together, and moreover I can tell that Lori’s are functioning similarly. We are living in a momentum of what we are creating, and we can feel the attendees with us too. Remarkably, without the vertiginous disorientation such a contradictory condition might produce, our sense of time simultaneously slows down and stays constant.
What I’m describing is, of course, a peak experience. More typically, when I’m playing, I’m all-too-easily distracted by, say, a problem with my horn, indigestion, or, most perniciously, that nagging voice in my head: “You sound like shit, Thomson.” But playing music in general, and with Lori in particular, has produced a vastly greater number of peak experiences than has any other aspect of life. Does this mean that these experiences produce the best music? Of that I’m skeptical. Like most musicians, I suspect, and certainly like most improvisers, I’ve listened back to concerts that felt flow-state amazing but don’t sound especially good in retrospect, and the opposite too. Still, I think the batting average is pretty high, that the music generally benefits from the intersubjective focus that produces the flow-states I describe, from peak experiences that, at once, have momentum and are momentous.
I’m allergic to theorising that takes music-making as a model for other kinds of social relation ‘in the real world.’ Instead, for me music-making embodies its own social relations, discrete in each incarnation, “a dimension of ordinary reality” as the British guitarist Keith Rowe puts it. So it’s with some reticence that I consider how the experiences I describe above might translate into a more attentive, less distracted experience of other, non-musical dimensions. How to grow the amplitude of the moment, how to slow time, how to fold the spotlight and the scanner into a total attentiveness? I suppose to a degree it will have to do with the nature of the task at hand; what rare glimpses of total focus I’ve found while writing this text have been by way purely top-down attention, and thus thoroughly at the mercy of the countless momentary distractions surrounding me. Much else that I might do in a day functions similarly.
So, at least for now, music remains a laboratory where I can experiment with the perception of the moment, to feel its amplitude bloom in ways that remain mostly elusive in the rest of my life. I’m thinking of Ornette Coleman now. Improvised melodies by that eminent temporal scientist, created in intersubjective symphony with his wonderful collaborators, seem to fold time. They unfold, wave-like, but somehow start and end simultaneously. They are a flash of experience, an all-at-once-ness. Evergreen presence. Fertile soil in which to grow the moment. Revisiting my favourite recordings, I’m increasingly convinced that, in his lovingly eccentric, less objectively goal-oriented way, Ornette, like Mario Lemieux, simply never missed. It’s a joy to fathom how he might have been experiencing the flow of time: Le moment magnifique.
Scott Thomson
Toronto, July 2024
Published in The Pit: A Plateau Periodical, issue three (winter 2024-25)