Practicing the harp for my upcoming "performance" has been good for my soul.
Part of the goodness has simply been that practicing for an objective is always easier than just practicing, at least for me. Knowing I am going to be playing in front of someone will tend to do that for me.
It has also been good as a general re-introduction to not only the harp on a more regular basis, but a re-examination of my life in general. And especially those things which, for whatever reason, I have put to the side.
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There was a time - years and years ago - when my life was very different, with a lot more music and singing and learning and reading of some less than serious things, tinged with a very strong streak of hopeless romanticism.
It is easy to look and say "Well, of course things had to change: after all, we have to grow older and take on responsibility and so forth." But looking back on that, I wonder if that is as true as it was presented.
For example, I have well over 25 years in my current industry. 95% to 99% of the work that I did - the products worked on, the projects worked on - have been placed into bankers boxes and are located at long term storage facilities, where they are slowly been shredded per a pre-established time frames (the modern version of this, of course, is that everything is now electronically stored and deleted according to the same time frames). A 99% failure rate is not the sort of thing that shouts "Good investment of time".
I then look at the things I gave up to do this, the person I had to become in order to do these things - and wonder if the present me is the better for them.
Does that mean everything else that happened in those years was also an effective failure? Not at all. Lots of very fine things happened during those times as well. I made new friends, had a family, took up new practices (including writing a blog), and had experiences that I would have never likely had otherwise.
But now I am entering a different phase of my life. And am starting to ask questions.
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The reality is that - for the first time in a very long time - I have the ability to choose a life again. Maybe not completely all over again, but I have a great deal of freedom that I have not had in years - not just in what I do, but who I am.
And I as I pluck away at the strings of my harp, working to embed the songs into my brain, I find the resonance of the notes awakening other things as well, the faintest sounds of someone who used to be awakening for the first time in years.
For these sorts of things, I try to focus on the bigger picture. It matters not that your projects ended up in a box to be shredded. What matters is that you worked for someone whom you presumably made happy by working on those projects at the time and in return they gave you money to help keep a roof over your head and keep you fed. Once you are not reliant on the money for shelter or food, you stop working for that person and they get someone else. If you require long term attention given to you for what you produced for that paycheck, and I don’t think you are one of those people, you are in the wrong business.
ReplyDeleteEd makes a salient point TB, self reflection can be a tricky business. As long as you gave an honest day's effort....well.... Realizing now that there may be alternative paths available is another chapter, be glad you're above ground.......:)
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