Being Present: Not Everything Has to Be a Performance

(First published 10/7/2019)

I am always preaching about making art and music and doing creative things just for the sheer joy of it. 

Recently, though, bullsh*t was called. Or rather, something happened that made me take a closer look at myself.  Back story: I love to sing. I love singing alone or with friends, accompanied by instruments or a cappella. Of course, I sing in the shower (the acoustics are great), and I don’t even care most of the time that my downstairs neighbors probably hear me. I also enjoy singing in front of a “real” audience (not just people who hear me through walls and floors).  

One of my favorite ways to have fun is to jam with others.

When I lived in Ohio, I sang regularly with a rather informal band — a group of friends who, between them, played everything from harmonica to banjo to guitar to didgeridoo. We'd frequently jam into the morning hours. Parties were often built around making our music. 

When I moved to Boston, I didn’t know anyone, let alone any musicians. I missed making music. I missed it so much that I sometimes thought I wanted to move back just to have that again. 

About a year into my life here, I did become friends with two musicians, Paul and Todd. We worked on some songs together and did a couple of open mics, and I started dreaming of more songs I’d like to work on with them, and more places to go where we could sing for an audience.  

But somewhere along the line, I dropped the ball. 

I can’t really say why, for sure. With my job and other activities, I often found it hard to find time to get together, and we often couldn’t match up our schedules anyway. 

But maybe it was also because I had begun falling in love with someone. In hindsight, I should have shared those jam sessions with him, invited him in, but I didn’t. As I said, in hindsight... The person I fell in love with, Thomas, played the guitar, too. One of the first times we got together, long before we talked about love or even if we’d get together another time, I invited him to my house to work on music together.  

I fell in love with his voice, and his passion, and his wonderful ability to envision and create.  In the three years we've been together, ever since that first time we shared our songs and our voices, music has been a connector for us... a way communicate with each other, have intense fun together, and make up after a disagreement (or deflect an argument before one of us regrets it).

over time, Every now and then, Paul and Todd would pop up on Facebook and I’d see sometimes that one or both had a gig somewhere. 

They’d found new singers, new people to play with. It happens, metaphorically or for real, when we don’t keep up relationships.  

Thomas has other interests that take precedence over “playing out.” He enjoys playing the guitar and making music for the sheer joy of making music, and for the reasons I've already mentioned. Thomas also has a gorgeous soul.  I, on the other hand, for all of the joy I have had from sharing music with Thomas, also had an agenda in the back of my mind. I looked forward to the day when we could play together for an audience, even if just a song or two at an open mic.  

Sometimes, I would find myself challenging his intonation, or getting frustrated when we couldn’t get a harmony right. I tend to want to go over and over something till I get it right… not always a good trait, depending on where in your life you apply it. My mother was a piano teacher and a choir director…It's in my nature. 

On a recent Sunday morning, as I was going through email and Facebook posts and Thomas was tuning his guitar, I noticed in my newsfeed that Paul and Todd were playing together that day at a local Porchfest. I felt that twinge that I hadn’t felt in awhile.

Maybe it was simply because I had woken up in a melancholy mood that day.  It was too late to get to where they were playing so we could hear them. Next time, I thought.  “My two old friends that I used to sing with are playing Porchfest today," I sighed. "It makes me so sad that I’m not singing with them.”  

And then I realized that what i'd just said was hurtful.

I knew it sounded like I wished I were singing with Paul and Todd instead of with him. I knew that trying to explain what I really meant would just make it worse. On the other hand, Thomas claimed that his feelings were ok, and by all indications, I was probably feeling worse about what I’d said than he was. 

Having grown up with band directors and piano teachers who manipulated a kid's relationship with music so that it became an emotional weapon, I have always been sensitive to causing someone hurt around their relationship with music... or with art or creativity of any kind. Maybe that's why hearing myself diminish our music, even if I didn't mean it that way, hurt my heart. 

“What you said didn’t bother me as much as the fact that you really want to sing in front of an audience, and I just don’t care that much about it," Thomas said. "I don’t have anything against you doing that, but I just really want to play for the fun of playing. I’m happy just playing.” 

I remembered how many times I’d found other people annoying when they seemed unable to make music unless they turned it into a performance or a competition. 

The people who have the need to be pedantic about chords and lyrics.

The people who turn music into a contest of who plays better and who knows more, whose guitar or violin is better, who can play the most instruments, who knows the most "names.” 

The people who strangle the wonderful fellowship of music, completely unaware that they may have extinguished it from someone's heart. 

If there are times when I am any of those people, they are not who I want to be.

That's probably why I was obsessing a little now, still wondering...Had I implied that our music wasn’t really fully legitimate until we were “performing” somewhere? Did some part of me actually feel that way?  

I think most people who love their medium recognize the value of practicing, of striving to improve. But it doesn’t always have to be with an end goal of performance before an audience, or of showing the world how great we are. 

Practice and improvement do other things that are more valuable. Like deepening our relationship with our medium. And connecting with the ones, or the one, we share our medium with. When people can connect by playing music together, offering up and accepting the best of whatever is in their souls, that's the most divine fellowship, and that, I believe, is why music — any form of creating, really — was given to us. 

The real sweetness in creating anything comes in not pushing aside the “now,” but instead savoring it. 

Maybe I’ll have the opportunity to play out again, or maybe I won’t, but Thomas, without intending to, reminded me that one of the greatest pleasures of making music, or creating of any kind, comes when we are fully present in the moment of creating it, wherever it is.