Having the freedom to set your own schedule does NOT equal having time.
These past few weeks have been great, but have left me with minutes a day or less to do what I set out to do: make music. My SPCA volunteering is completely stalled. Depending on my mood I flip-flop between the bright side of this reality (I've spent a lot of time with my German family that I rarely see; I visited my good friends in LA; I'm going to New Mexico and Burning Man for the first time) and the anxious, can't-sleep side (I'm two-thirds of the way through my year off and what do I have to show for it? Am I not taking this seriously? Have I made the right choices?). It's a bit of a roller-coaster, and I'm not sure I'm tall enough to ride.
A lot of this stress I think comes from the fact that it's been forever since I finished a track. I have quite a few good projects in the pipeline, but with mostly sporadic time to work on them it's hard to focus and get the job done. Isn't this why I took a year off? To be able to devote twelve sequential hours a day to my music if I want to?
Once I get back from Burning Man and my friend from Germany (non-family this time) who's on a trip around the world heads out of SF, I'm thinking of going into hermit mode. I need to get back to the task at hand. I need to feel like the master of my own time. And most of all I need to feel like I'm using this precious time off for everything it's worth, because I dread an end at which I see only squandered potential and not the growth and achievement I know could have been.
1 comment:
Oh, dear Kirby, did you imagine that any amount of time would be enough for you to work on a piece to your satisfaction? I will be bold enough to propose that your only mistake was having no accountability to anything outside of your own perfectionism. But was that really a mistake?
You are not prolific, and I'm pretty sure you were never supposed to be. To take time to invest in you and share yourself with your people is to do us all a good turn and very unselfish of you. Don't blush, because you know it's true.
I can feed my whole family comfortably and to all of our satisfaction with the plentiful meat on the shank of our steer, but the marrow, a delicacy so succulent you can actually taste the essence of life in every precious bite is the part of supper we're looking forward to. And there is only one or two bites. Does this mean the time it took to grow the muscle tissue and jealous femur which protect this fatty delight was squandered?
Dang, now I need to go see if we have bay leaves.
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