Your Passion Picks You

The start of 2019 has been exhausting. The Moxie Strings have been doing mostly school performances and workshops, which leaves us a different level of exhausted. Often we find ourselves zombie-eyed between clinics, sitting for the first time in 3 hours, dreading the bell ringing and another onslaught of students entering because it means summoning the energy to get up from the chair and give all our energy to providing a peak, meaningful experience… for the 4th time that day.

It feels insurmountable in the moment; but when we start performing for the students, the exhaustion disappears. Their eyebrows raise, smiles form, and they start glancing sideways at each other. Within a few minutes, they’re all grinning, wide-eyed and bobbing in their chairs. (Unless they’re 8th graders, then they fight the smile and let a twitchy half-smirk escape. It’s angsty and adorable.) The next step is my favorite: once they’ve heard us play, we make it clear to them that our music and enviable “musician lives” are completely within reach for them too. Our backgrounds in music look just like theirs: we started as orchestra kids in public schools. We then teach them a rock tune, improvisation, and share an evening performance together, all the while reminding them of the incredible amount they’ve achieved in such a short time.

Without sounding overconfident, we can tell they leave changed. We all do. For me, ending a clinic is like waking up from a blissful dream. The whole time I’m teaching my brain is acutely focused on what’s to be addressed next, what’s to be prioritized based on their questions, and how to make sure they’re as successful and inspired as possible in the time allotted. I am fully present. Sometimes I go a full hour thinking of nothing else but the needs of the little faces in front of me.

We send them out the door with their new inspiration buzz and our reality comes rushing back. I remember that I’m tired, in physical pain, and overwhelmed… but I’m also emotionally re-energized and it’s much easier to put everything into perspective. For me this “draining while filling” paradox comes from the combination of passionate musical creativity, empathy, service, connecting, and commitment to making the world better through the lens of our next generation. They all seem to overlap in harmony when I’m teaching.

In my last post (here), I posed several questions: What fills you up? What do you have unending energy for? What do you choose to do, without having to summon motivation (or caffeine?) While It may drain you, it is so fulfilling that it energizes you in the process?

My answer is service. Specifically service through personal connection. Coming to this conclusion was initially a tough pill for me to swallow; I expected to say that making music was where I found my fulfillment. I have dreams of mass, musical outreach and moving mountains with my art, but I cannot deny that my most natural gift and passion is all that goes into providing the relationship, environment, and empathy necessary to give others the help they need in exactly the way that they’ll best absorb it. This is present for me when communicating with an audience, mentoring a student, helping a friend, and is how I would define masterful teaching.

I reached the end of one of my travel weeks recently (4 destinations in a week) and realized I spent every day that week doing some kind of teaching or mentoring, even my days “off.” Some of it paid and some of it unpaid, but all of it totally voluntary. It was an exhausting, cold, long week… and it’s the warmest and fullest I’ve felt in a long time.

Music comes naturally to me and I find it my most powerful and enjoyable art-form, but I’m beginning to understand music’s role in my life as more than a creative outlet, but also my platform for outreach. The moment pictured here was a revelation for me. I was on stage in front of a large adoring crowd, bright lights, photographers, etc, and it was Keiran joining us on stage that made me feel most alive. I was struck by how the presence of a student, and the opportunity to not just experience but provide a peak experience filled me up in a completely different way.

My whole world seemed to change direction. Don’t get me wrong, I sincerely appreciate every single one of those show-goers and adore them right back, but this was a tangible wake-up call as to where my heart finds its rhythm. I’m a teacher to the core, and while I love the idea of fame, I love the idea of the outreach fame could produce more than the attention or celebration. I want to be far-reaching for the sake of service.

This travel life offers me lots of opportunities to learn about myself and this world, and I think that’s what propels my social media and this blog. I’m so lucky to learn the amount that I do, but that’s not enough for me; I need to share it as well. “Connecting” has come to mean many things in my life. It may be speaking vulnerably for a large audience, or my service buzz may come from something as small as the opportunity to hear about a stranger’s bad day sitting in an airport. Big or small, I wish everyone the opportunity to feel the skin-prickling, tears-welling, laugh-and-cry moment when you know you’re doing what you were put in the earth to do. It’s unmistakable, and recognizing it means you’ll never work another day in your life.

All this being said, I still have absolutely NO idea what the next few years of my life will bring, and the uncertainty is both exciting and terrifying. What I do know, is that the more I help people (particularly youth), the more I understand where my heart is, the more I can personally and eloquently speak to people about the importance of finding where their heart is, the more people I can reach… and the cup-filling cycle continues.
My mantra for the next year:
steady and purposeful.

If you’re having trouble diagnosing what might be your drainer/filler passion, try making a list with three columns: “drains,”“fills,” and “both.” For me, computer work went in the drain column, sleep went in the fills column, and teaching a private lesson went in the “both.” I’m undyingly grateful to have such a passion and to have diagnosed it. I hope you’ll be so lucky. The world needs as many passionate, fulfilled people as we can get.

So happy to serve you all, drriifters. 💙🌏💨

Diana