As I was practicing the cello this morning, I remember feeling a big sense of frustration that I wasn’t hitting the notes properly. In that moment, I caught myself in an interesting thought: “Shit, Timmy is going to scold me later.”
I thought about how my fingers were clumsy and how Timmy would stare into my soul, judging or pondering what I had failed to do in the course of the week.
Somehow, though, in the course of that thought a small shift took place in my frame.
“What if that happened to him?”
I remembered, at that instant, that my teacher was an actual musician and got paid to do shows. I imagine making the mistakes that I make on a stage in front of a paying audience. Wouldn’t that be catastrophic, somehow? Performance is part of the art of any creator and creative, and the logical end point of practice is doing, to the extent that we are paid or compensated for the things that we manage to successfully do.
It is never about practicing for the public, but instead showcasing the byproducts of a completed thought process: the willpower of somebody who did everything that they needed in order to succeed. Whether it was to do it without mistakes or to somehow accomplish the goal or the task that they set out to accomplish without errors, that’s what it takes to make it, I thought – it was the willpower to actually just do it right.
It was a small starting point, but it has made me start to rethink and think about everything else that I do in my life. These years are short and they are brutal, but the question is whether you should accept a reality where you don’t make it, where you’re not giving every single ounce of your energy into bringing the things you want to life.
- Your awareness of things
- Your financial success
- Your skills and abilities in the things you value, appreciate, or say that you like
- Your relationships with those around you whom you can say that you love
It gave me food for thought that even now I am chewing upon, and I anticipate myself chewing upon in the days, minutes, and seconds ahead.
