I’m reading Donella H. Meadows’ “Thinking in Systems: A Primer.” I want to be a better systems thinker. On page 5, I came across this little bit of text.

Systems happen all at once. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions simultaneously. To discuss them properly, it is necessary somehow to use a language that shares some of the same properties as the phenomena under discussion.

In music notation, a system is a group of two or more staves that are joined together by a vertical bar, or brace. Look up “piano music” on google, and you’ll see systems everywhere. The function of a system is to represent what multiple things are doing at the same time. A musician must make sense of a system in order to bring a piece of music to life.

Life, or nature, happen everywhere all at once. Nature is a system. Nature has a language — perhaps that language is actual human language, perhaps it’s music, maybe it’s a bark, maybe it is trees changing colors, or tides rising… everything in some way is interconnected with everything else all at once.

The gift of learning music is that you learn to see and hear the system underneath all of the noise that is life. The vibrations.