After 58 years behind the kit, I thought I knew about tough talks. Used to believe they were about winning, about getting your point across like a final, crashing cymbal. Kid, let me tell you: I was dead wrong.
For years, I avoided the hard conversations. When my daughter was twelve, I was deep in the bottle, missing her school plays, her birthday. She’d ask, "Dad, why do you smell like whiskey?" I’d shrug it off, change the subject. "Later, sweet pea," I’d say, turning away. I thought I was protecting her from the mess. I was just protecting myself.
The truth shattered me when she was twenty-five. We sat across from each other at a diner, the silence louder than any argument. She finally said, "I don’t know you, Dad. Not really." Not angry. Just… gone. That silence wasn’t empty. It was a rest note I’d been ignoring for a decade.
Here’s what I know after 78 years: Difficult conversations aren’t about you. They’re not about being right or making the other person feel small. They’re about the space between the notes. The rest. You learn to play the rest notes too. That silence isn’t failure—it’s the breath before the next phrase.
I spent decades thinking silence was peace. It was just fear. The real courage isn’t in the loud words—it’s in sitting with the quiet, letting it hold the weight, and then speaking from that space, not at it. My daughter and I didn’t fix everything in one talk. But we started. We learned to listen through the fear, not around it.
The hardest part isn’t saying the hard thing. It’s realizing you’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to say it, when the only perfect moment is now, with all the mess and the fear and the love tangled up in it. You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be present. Like a good drummer. You don’t play every beat. Sometimes, you just let the silence breathe.
— Roger Jackson, still playing