Two years ago, my wife and I spent a month in Cape Town through our nonprofit foundation, working alongside Justice Desk Africa, artists from South Korea, and musicians from the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra on a project using music and the arts to support youth leadership, connection, and care.
The young people we met at Justice Desk needed no introduction; their presence told the story before words ever could. They shared stories of pain, grief, resilience, fear, joy, and hope. We learned to keep going, even when the lights went out. We learned that joy does not wait for suffering to leave.
One day after rehearsal, one of our young artists, Jang Yunyoung, looked at me and asked a question so simple it disarmed me.
“Why do you drink so much coffee?”
Anyone who knew me then would have understood the question immediately. Coffee was not a preference. It was ritual. It was identity. It was the fresh cup I carried into every meeting like a shield. It was what got me through the next rehearsal, the next flight, the next deadline, the next late night, the next version of myself I thought I needed to become.
I answered without thinking.
“Because I’m tired.”
Then I asked her, almost reflexively, “What do you do when you feel tired?”
She paused.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just feel tired.”
I remember being genuinely puzzled by her answer. Why would anyone simply feel tired when they could solve it? Why sit with discomfort when you could outrun it? In my mind, tiredness was a problem. Energy was the answer. Motion was proof. To stop was to fall behind.
During that project, a citywide strike shut down transportation across large parts of Cape Town. Many of the young women we were working with lived outside the city center and suddenly had no reliable way to reach us. It would have been easy to cancel the day, to postpone, to accept the situation as impossible. Instead, the team at Justice Desk Africa went out to get them. They found ways into blocked communities. They navigated uncertainty. They brought them back.
That evening, after a celebratory banquet of Korean and local foods, the rolling brownouts returned. Everything went black. Then, from somewhere in the room, one voice began to sing quietly. Then another. Then another. Someone found a drum. I joined by drumming on the large banquet table. As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, shapes emerged: people dancing, smiling, clapping, moving together. Voices rose. Rhythms gathered. Laughter returned.
Earlier this year, I quit coffee.
Not dramatically. Not permanently. I still enjoy it now, mostly on weekends over breakfast with my wife and children. I love the smell of it. I love the taste of it. But some mornings, I simply feel tired.
This season, with the Johns Creek Symphony Orchestra, we presented a program called What We Carry as part of our immersive Music as Healing initiative.Audience members sat within the orchestra and were offered blindfolds. We asked nothing of them except presence. What I remember most were the unguarded smiles beneath the blindfolds, and the sound of a room breathing more slowly as we performed John Cage’s 4’33”.
That concert was never about fixing anyone. Music cannot remove grief. It cannot undo loss. It cannot guarantee clarity.
But music can do something just as important.
It can give us room: to feel what has been postponed, to remember, to breathe, to sit beside sorrow without immediately trying to erase it, and to notice that joy, somehow, still survives.
I often think about that moment when the lights went out in Cape Town. I think about the quiet wisdom in Jang Yunyoung’s answer. I think about audiences sitting inside an orchestra, eyes covered, listening not only to the music, but perhaps to themselves.
Some fatigue cannot be caffeinated away. Some healing begins when nothing is fixed at all.
And in that, I found something I had been missing.
Space.
Just enough space to begin again.