When you work and live in one place, you have the gift of predictability and control over most of your daily life. While that level of predictability is nearly impossible on the road, there are practices that allow us to retain some agency and continue to create a healthy and productive life while traveling every day. After all, unpredictability is part of the magic of travel life, and finding ways to accommodate it allows us to enjoy all the twists and turns.
Goodbyes happen every day and to varying degrees throughout our year. They span from finishing a great meal to losing a loved one. Through regular journaling I found that being intentional about this process was comforting and helped me ease the transitions from life with something to life without it.
Once the worrying brain has found something to attach itself to, it can spend hours hypothesizing and constructing elaborate tales of possible outcomes. It wrongly convinces us that somehow fixating on the future will change the course of action. While experiencing worry is a natural response to uncertainty, it doesn’t need to consume the amount of energy or number of hours it often does.
Grief is volatile and all-encompassing, physically and emotionally, and we are at its mercy. I welcome you into this space because I believe there is healing in sharing, for all involved, and simply composing this has already given me the ability to write the more hopeful "next steps" included further in.
I strongly believe that “life is a journey not a destination”, but this doesn’t give me much day-to-day guidance. Where do worthwhile hustle and healthy productivity fit in the mix? When do we push, and when do we sit back? Surely our destinies are not written so entirely that we should just be along for the ride. Where do ambition, activism, and goal-setting fit?
We’ve all been given a glimpse of a horrifying scenario and have been given a second chance. So now what? We want pre-2020 back, but not all of it. So what do we change? What do we take with us, and what do we leave behind? After living with the absence of so many things, I suggest we have a very rare opportunity to examine our lives and intentionally decide what gets added back in and what doesn’t. Now is the time to give this some thought.
“A year in parenthesis” We’re officially one year into this pandemic. And while we may be eager to forget it ever happened, I suggest that we still have the option of being changed for the better. In my last few posts I outlined the struggles that I and other musicians are facing in the absence of being on stage. So much of our self-worth is tied to the adrenaline rush and feedback we receive, and without them things begin to crumble and our motivation can slow to a stop. (I’d love for you to take a second to check out…
Those of us linked to the performance industry receive our reinforcement in the form of an engaged audience, big smiles, applause, and maybe a personal story shared with us after a show, so it's no surprise that many of us are feeling more stalled and unmotivated than ever. The more successful we feel, the more eager we are to create, and right now there’s nothing to trigger that cycle. So then the question is: when we’re not creating, who are we, even?
“Missing Motivation” To say it has been a tough year for musicians is an understatement. We are all facing unprecedented challenges, and my personal view from inside the music community has been of feelings such as denial, disbelief, crisis, apathy, loss of self, and a host of others. I have had some very powerful conversations with musicians about their symptoms in addition to experiencing many of them myself, and I have spent the last several months taking a deeper look. This is all in effort to give words to our shared experience, and to allow us to find relief in…
Performing musicians across the globe are suffering greatly amidst the COVID19 pandemic. Live shows may not look the same for a very long time. While the rest of the world begins to slowly re-open, musicians’ very art form and profession are in question with no certainty in sight. What began several months ago as worry about show cancellations has now become a deep and punishing sadness. We are confronting the absence of a large piece of our identity and way of life that we still can’t quite fathom, much less know how to handle. I hope this article will both…