The Wrong Note You Play Next

So here's something¹ I've been thinking about lately, which happened last Tuesday at 7:43 AM while I was sitting in my front yard with my coffee, one of those rare moments when the morning air hasn't yet turned hostile and you can actually exist outside without feeling personally attacked by the atmosphere², when my neighbor's car alarm went off for maybe the thousandth time since the year began. And instead of doing my usual thing, which involves elaborate fantasies about leaving passive-aggressive notes or maybe just accidentally-on-purpose letting the air out of his tires³, I found myself thinking about Miles Davis.

Not because car alarms sound anything remotely musical⁴ but because I'd been reading this interview where Davis talks about wrong notes. He says (and I'm paraphrasing here because the exact quote lives somewhere in a browser tab I'll never find again) basically, no note is actually wrong. What makes it wrong or right is whatever note comes after it. Which, if you think about it (and I was, sitting there in my plastic Adirondack chair, the one with the broken armrest I keep meaning to fix), is both completely obvious and somehow revolutionary.

Because here's my neighbor, right? Let's call him Brad⁵. Brad's car alarm is objectively a wrong note in the symphony of Tuesday morning suburban life. It disrupts. It annoys. It makes me want to move to a cabin in Montana where the only sounds are wind and maybe the occasional bear. But Brad? Brad never seems bothered by his own alarm. He'll come out eventually, usually after about three minutes of sonic assault, beep his key fob twice, and go about his day. No apology wave. No sheepish grin. Just... movement forward.

And I'm sitting there in my yard, coffee getting cold, watching this whole performance from my front-row seat to suburban theater, realizing Brad might actually understand something I don't⁶.

See, there's this thing we do (and by "we" I mean pretty much everyone who's ever been conscious and had feelings) where we treat every disruption, every mistake, every minor catastrophe as if it's the definitive statement about our lives. The car alarm becomes not just an annoying sound but evidence of our terrible luck, our bad choices in neighborhoods, the universe's personal vendetta against our morning peace. We become connoisseurs of our own victimhood, sommeliers of suffering, carefully cataloging each vintage of inconvenience.

The psychological literature⁷ calls this "external locus of control," which is academic-speak for believing you're basically a pinball getting bounced around by forces beyond your influence. Julian Rotter coined the term back in 1954, probably after dealing with his own version of Brad's car alarm. People with external locus of control tend to see themselves as passengers in their own lives, which sounds relaxing at first glance. But passengers don't get to pick the destination.

And here's where it gets tricky, because recognizing you have agency (real, actual control over your responses if not your circumstances) doesn't mean subscribing to that toxic positivity nonsense where everything happens for a reason and you should be grateful for your struggles⁸. Sometimes things just suck. Sometimes the car alarm goes off during your one quiet moment in the yard. Sometimes people disappoint you in ways that feel intentional, calculated, designed to wound.

I knew someone once⁹ who described this as the snake bite problem. You're walking along, minding your own business, and suddenly: fang, venom, pain. The bite itself is bad enough. But then what do most of us do? We chase the snake. We spend hours, days, years even, hunting down that particular serpent, demanding answers. Why did you bite me? What did I do to deserve this? How can I make you understand the damage you've caused?

Meanwhile, the venom's still in your system, doing its work, and you're adding exhaustion to injury.

The boring truth (and I mean boring in the best possible way, the way that good relationships are boring, the way that compound interest is boring, the way that drinking enough water and getting eight hours of sleep is boring) is that the only note you can actually play is the next one. You can't un-ring the alarm. You can't un-bite the bite. You can't revise the mistake, the betrayal, the disappointment. You can only decide what comes after.

Which brings me back to Brad and his Tuesday morning sonic terrorism. What if Brad's nonchalance isn't ignorance or inconsideration but a kind of wisdom? He doesn't apologize for the alarm because apologies would make it a bigger deal than it is. He doesn't rush because rushing would validate the disruption. He just... continues. Plays the next note¹⁰.

This isn't about becoming Brad. This is about recognizing that between stimulus and response, between the wrong note and what comes next, there's a space. Viktor Frankl called it our last human freedom: the ability to choose our response. And maybe that choice doesn't have to be profound or transformative. Maybe it can be as simple as staying in your chair, finishing your coffee, noticing that the morning light through the tree makes these beautiful patterns on the grass you'd never seen before.

The regular habits, the mundane responses, the boring daily choices aren't consolation prizes for people who can't manage anything more exciting. They're the actual composition. Wake up at the same time. Eat food that doesn't require an Instagram filter. Save the money instead of buying the thing. Read books written by dead people who can't disappoint you with problematic tweets. Move your body in ways that won't require surgery later. Sit in your yard before the day gets complicated.

These aren't the notes that anyone notices. Nobody's going to congratulate you for going to bed at 9:30 PM on a Friday¹¹. But string enough of these boring notes together, and suddenly you've got something that sounds suspiciously like a life lived on purpose.

The paradox, of course, is that choosing the boring response, the measured next note, the steady continuation, requires more agency than any dramatic gesture. Anyone can chase a snake; it's pure adrenaline, all instinct. But choosing not to? Choosing to let the car alarm fade into background noise while you notice the cardinal at your bird feeder, the way your grass needs cutting but not urgently, the fact that you're alive and sitting outside and relatively unbothered? That's jazz, baby.

And maybe that's what Davis was really talking about. Not that mistakes don't matter, but that they matter less than what we make of them. Every moment is potentially a wrong note, depending on your perspective. The coffee's too weak, too strong, too cold. The neighbor's too loud, too close, too Brad. The chair's broken, the yard needs work, you're sitting outside at 7:43 AM on a Tuesday questioning your life choices.

But then comes the next moment, and with it, the chance to play something that retroactively makes sense of what came before. Not in a everything-happens-for-a-reason way, but in a everything-happened-and-now-what way.

So I stayed in my yard. Finished my cold coffee. Watched Brad drive away. Noticed things: the way morning shadows are different from evening ones, how the street gets quiet again after the alarm stops, how sitting still in one place for long enough makes you part of the landscape instead of just an observer of it. The alarm would go off again tomorrow, probably. But tomorrow I'd be in my yard again too. And the day after that. And eventually, the accumulation of morning-sitting would outweigh the accumulation of alarm-hearing, not because yards are inherently more powerful than car alarms, but because I kept playing that particular note.

And when I finally stood up to go inside, my coffee long gone cold, I noticed the armrest on my plastic chair was still cracked, still waiting for me to fix it. Which somehow felt exactly right: the wrong note still there, the next one still mine to play.¹².

¹ And when I say "lately," I mean with the kind of obsessive frequency usually reserved for checking whether you locked the door or wondering if that thing you said at a party six years ago was as weird as you remember.

² The kind of morning where you can pretend you're the sort of person who sits outside with coffee regularly, who has "outdoor morning rituals," who probably also does yoga and makes their own kombucha, even though the truth is this is the first time you've used this chair since I bought it in a fit of suburban optimism during COVID.

³ These fantasies have become increasingly elaborate over time, evolving from simple property damage to complex Rube Goldberg machines of revenge involving trained squirrels and strategically placed birdseed. The fact that I'm sharing this probably says more about my mental state than any amount of self-reflection could.

⁴ Though John Cage would probably disagree, and he'd have a point. Everything is music if you're pretentious enough about it. I once sat through a performance of 4'33" and spent the entire time thinking about whether my checking account would cover the parking meter, which probably wasn't the kind of ambient sound Cage had in mind but definitely qualified as contemporary anxiety composition.

⁵ Not his real name, obviously, though wouldn't it be perfect if it was? Brad is somehow both a specific person and a universal concept. Every neighborhood has a Brad. Sometimes multiple Brads. They propagate through suburban environments via some mechanism science has yet to identify.

⁶ Or maybe Brad's just an inconsiderate jerk and I'm doing that thing where I project depth onto random behaviors because I've read too much philosophy and not enough instruction manuals.

⁷ Which I definitely didn't frantically Google at 2 AM last night while unable to sleep for unrelated reasons. And by "unrelated" I mean completely related to spending three hours constructing the perfect hypothetical argument with Brad about his car alarm, an argument that will never happen because I'm incapable of actual confrontation.

⁸ The kind of people who post sunrise photos with captions about gratitude and growth, who've turned their entire personality into a TED talk nobody asked for, who respond to your legitimate complaints with suggestions to "try meditation." These people are why I drink my coffee alone in my yard at 7:43 AM.

⁹ "Knew someone once" being code for "read it somewhere online and immediately adopted it as revealed truth." The internet has become this weird repository of borrowed wisdom where we all pretend we've had profound conversations with sages when really we're just recycling random Reddit comments from 2016. But the snake bite thing is good, regardless of its dubious provenance.

¹⁰ Of course, Brad might also just be dead inside, emotionally speaking. This is always a possibility. The line between enlightenment and complete dissociation is thinner than we'd probably prefer to admit.

¹¹ Trust me, I've tried telling people about my 9:30 bedtime. The look they give you suggests you've just admitted to collecting Victorian hair art or something equally concerning. There's this whole cultural thing where exhaustion is a badge of honor and getting enough sleep is somehow an admission of weakness, which explains a lot about why everyone's so angry all the time.

¹² The cracked armrest is a better metaphor than I meant it to be: visible flaw, permanently part of the chair, not a tragedy unless I decide it is. Maybe the point isn’t to fix it but to keep sitting in it, letting the next note be mine.