I was going over the fretboard on the bass with my 11-year-old son today, and when we got to the half step between B and C, I had to explain to him that unlike most other half steps between natural notes, B does not have a sharp (#). Naturally (though surprisingly in my morning stupor), his immediate question was, "Why does B not have a sharp?" I had no answer. I'm sure some savvy music theorist can adequately address this conundrum for those freshmen among us, but I haven't a clue. Yet, isn't this the case with so many things in life? Why is blue, blue? Why do animals possess instinct? Why did Adam have a belly button (or did he???)? Or why are lemons inherently sour but oranges sweet? I mean the list of unanswerable questions is practically infinite. And for those of us who want certainty and predictability in our lives (which is most of us), this reality is maddening! Even so, we must come to terms with it. Sometimes things are simply and fundamentally what they are. We can't change them but must learn to accept them, passively or actively negotiate them, and even thrive in their presence. To do otherwise or, worse, to succumb to some sort of control paradigm is to live in the endlessly frustrating space between the idyll and the futile. Lest someone accuse me otherwise, I am not proposing that we alternatively live as nihilists or give up trying to answer life's perplexing questions. Quite the contrary, I believe public and private inquiry and exploration are vital to the human spirit and progress. However, in our quest to know and to be, we will inevitably encounter things that we cannot--and maybe should not--answer or control, and in these instances, we must accept that an absent B# is sometimes simply an absent B#.
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