Response...Something Inside Me

This is a response to the previous blogs comments. I had originally intended to write something about this in the previous blog but it didn’t seem to pan out. After the comments I realized that I didn’t quite express myself accurately so here goes….

I picked up a guitar one day and began learning to play. Another day I wrote a song. Another day I stopped watching t.v. and wrote another song instead. After that I played my guitar most days and became better at it. Some days I wrote songs and in the past 14 years I’ve gotten better at that. Another day I played my first song for an audience…I kept doing that and got better at that too.

When I was in college studying Biology and later while getting my masters in Biotechnology I was completely distracted by music on a daily basis. Whenever I had a minute free I’d be writing or playing or trying to figure out how to get enough money together to record an album. One day I started recording my own songs. I kept doing that and I’m still getting better at that too.

One day I made a decision to make music my career. I stopped teaching so that I could do that. I turned down a job with a missions organization so that I could do that. I started playing lots of shows in my hometown. I got better at playing shows and got better at promoting myself. Later I turned down a job with the company I’d been stationed at during my masters degree so that I could move to America and continue pursuing music.

The examples above are the highlights but the point is this… For the past 14 years I’ve been working steadily in this direction. It has been said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become truly successful at something. I don’t know if I’ve reached that mark yet but I’ve certainly put in a few. Over the span of 14 years a person makes a lot of decisions… In my own life my decisions keep drawing me further down the path of a career in music. It doesn’t happen all at once but when you look back you realize that returning to where you once were would take almost as much work as it took to get to where you are now. When you stop using a path it stops looking so much like a path and becomes a faded remnant of a trail that once was. Bridges get burned and bottles get broken on your back trail. To go back might sometimes be necessary but it’s not going to be any easier than putting your head down and slogging it out with whatever is ahead that keeps making yesterday look so attractive.

What I’m saying is this… I am where I am on purpose. It’s no accident that I do the job I do or that I live where I live or that I’ve made the decisions I’ve made. Little by little, one decision at a time, I have burned bridges and broken bottles for 14 years to get here. I’m not sure just anyone would want to live in my shoes but I do want to live in them. I don’t expect everyone to understand what I’m doing but I do understand it. In general I’m excessively happy that I’ve made it this far and that I’m on the path that I’m on. There are specific things about the current moment in the path that I don’t like and I’ll admit that I probably spend way too much time dwelling on those things and preaching my woes for the world to read. I’m a complainer…so sue me.

In writing about the songs on the album I’m trying to capture the emotions of the songs and of the album in general. Sometimes that means putting myself back in the moment of whatever I was feeling at the time. The song “Something Inside Me” was written when I was absolutely confounded and frustrated and ready to throw in the towel. I wanted to give up. I wanted to stop trying. I even tried to give up music. But I found out that my passion for music and writing is something that is deep within me that I can’t control and which will never die. It’s too deeply ingrained. Perhaps it’s by design that I am this way. So I wrote the words “I’ll never give up because I don’t know what those words mean.” At the time in my life when I was utterly frustrated, completely depressed and most wanted to give up I wrote a song about not giving up. When I say I can’t give up… I really mean I can’t give up.

The album was titled “Beautiful Frustration” not because I thought it sounded like a cool name but because it captured the sentiment of everything I’d been through to get the thing done. It was the overall emotion that I was feeling during the writing of that album. I was frustrated but it was the kind of frustration you get when you are continuously working on a project that seems to progress too slowly. But there is progress and that’s why it’s beautiful. It’s the knocking of yourself against a problem over and over again that makes you stronger and eventually leads to a solution. I imagine that the guys who built the space shuttle, or Einstein (no I’m not comparing myself to them) would understand ‘beautiful frustration’ completely.

I am beautifully frustrated. My apologies if I let off steam about that too often. But I am determined and I am stubborn and I am committed to this thing I’ve set out to do. I’m investing in a future that I can live with instead of fixing my present to be satisfied now.

I will reach 10,000 hours. I will reach my goals. Say what you will or think what you will, I am realizing that I don’t much care anymore what people think because it doesn’t matter and it doesn’t change what I’m going to do. When I find myself in those moments of complete disgust and frustration with my reality I remember this song and I tell myself that “I’m trying…come try with me. I’m fighting…come fight with me. I’m flying…come fly with me.” I sing those words to the heavens as a kind of challenge. I sing those words to the walls that seem daunting as if I were a boxer squaring my shoulders to my opponent, bouncing lightly on the balls of my feet, glint in my eye, jaw set and saying, “Alright. Let’s do this.”