We’re in the guitar section of a music store. There’s a woman, probably in her sixties, playing guitar. The chords have a jazz inflection — loose, confident, minor-leaning perhaps, though it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the rhythm. She isn’t performing. She’s offering something and leaving space for it to be met.
My son picks up a guitar. He doesn’t ask or hesitate. He starts to riff, finding notes that don’t interrupt her playing but enter it. He listens first, then responds, and then, almost without effort, begins to shape the direction of the exchange.
Something shifts in me before I have language for it. It’s like suddenly noticing gravity by floating — a background condition made visible only in its absence. I feel a softening in my body, a quiet awe, a sense of blessing that doesn’t need interpretation.
This isn’t pride exactly. It’s closer to witnessing: the felt experience of development unfolding in real time, not as effort or achievement, but as relationship. Neuroplasticity is part of what’s happening, of course, but what’s more striking is the attunement — the timing, the trust, the way listening precedes confidence.
What I’m watching is music as co-regulation, as conversation. And without trying to, I slip into a simple kind of awareness. There’s no commentary running alongside the moment, no future thinking, no impulse to measure or explain it. Just presence, and the quiet recognition of something essential happening as it’s allowed to happen.