Saving your eyes for the music? Listen to this post instead:
Introduction
I’ve spent cumulative years of practice time and expended quite a lot of resources in pursuit of becoming better than the vast majority of the global population at two highly specific skills: playing the harp and writing contemporary classical instrumental concert music.
Getting to pursue music as a career is certainly a privilege (especially considering that most humans who have ever existed have lived hand-to-mouth); nevertheless, it’s a privilege that demands a tremendous amount of sacrifice.
As a young musician, I sacrificed a huge chunk of my youth in isolation at an instrument while practicing and composing. Later, I experienced the sacrificed opportunity cost of not having trained for a more financially rewarding career. And then on top of this, there’s sometimes a vague feeling that maybe, even if all my musical dreams were to come true and I were to have the career of my wildest imagining, maybe even then my life still won’t have made any sort of real difference.
“What then,” you ask me, “are you actually doing it for?”
Good question. What, in the end, do I actually have to show for my effort? I don’t mean what’s on my resume—there’s plenty enough to show there.
I mean: what really do I have to show? Why really do I trade so much of my life for this thing that I love?—that I sometimes loathe?
For myself?
I know that can’t quite be true, because there was never a time when I was more unmotivated to practice than during the months of the pandemic when I had no outlet for in-person sharing.
For what then?
The world?
Do I seriously believe the world needs more music? More of my music? In the face of so much suffering? Won’t it go on functioning more or less the same without my imperceptible contributions?
…A few short years ago, these were debilitating questions. Or, perhaps, these questions sprang up out of my debilitation.
Now, somehow, these questions have lost their paralyzing power over me. Without their dampening my ambition, I can hold these questions in my hands, exploring their shape, pondering.
Is this because I have answers now?
Kind of. Maybe. Provisionally, perhaps.
Here are my thoughts. You can decide.
. . .