Yet another connection between playing music and living life:

Both should have a balance between planning and spontaneity.

Yet another excuse for my experiments in the kitchen.

This afternoon I sat in an orchestra rehearsal in my normal place but, because of injury, without my cello. Even though the rehearsal did, of course, have my undivided attention, I started thinking about a note I hurriedly made on a list of vague, potentially bloggable ideas a few weeks ago (the Mac sticky note widget is a great invention), which reads: ‘We need to be more like conductors rather than individual players in an orchestra, who too often see one part of the bigger picture and do not empathise’. I wrote this during a period of thinking a lot about the parallels between playing music and living the other bits of life, and how the processes should ideally be symbiotic. ['Symbiosis': A great word which I spent an age trying to recall, defined by my Mac dictionary widget as 'a mutually beneficial relationship', and not to be confused with 'osmosis' which, for some reason, I keep doing, and totally misleadingly gives me mental images of GCSE biology experiments on potatoes.] My experience today has finally inspired me to transfer this thought from sticky to Rabbit…

So often we get so caught up in our own lives (our own instrument’s part) that we forget that others are sharing the same experiences, just from different perspectives, but being aware of how we fit into the bigger picture (the symphony, or whatever) may actually help us along our own paths. At the time of writing the sticky note on this subject I believed that attempting to oversee entire situations, giving equal but inevitably limited attention to each component (being the conductor), would help individuals gain the most valuable perspective. Sitting in my seat today without the challenging distraction of sight reading the music myself, however, I realised that I was in the prime position (similar to that of a musician listening back to their own recording, as discussed in the Feb 4 post, ’Hit pause on ‘perfection‘‘). I was connected enough to my own part of the whole to keep track of the small but important details for which I (or rather my fellow cellos) was responsible, but I wasn’t occupied so much by this part that I couldn’t keep an ear out (or more) for the overall ‘sound-vision’ or corporate goal. It’s certainly not invaluable to experience being the narrow-focused orchestral player or the zoomed-out conductor, but functioning on this middle ground between self-awareness and empathy seems ultimately ideal.

On a tangential note (perhaps a tritone – sorry, terrible geeky music joke), one more concerned with the temporal than the spacial, we should also keep in mind the teleology of a phrase, movement or complete work rather than only concentrate on the single note or chord being played at any given moment. In other words, living life with our longer term goals in mind, in addition to a more balanced awareness of the environment in which we function, can help us make sense of and tolerate the smaller steps along the way, just like my March 19 post (‘Save a goat this Easter‘) asserted that recalling previous personal patterns of mood and perspective can help us understand the present and anticipate or dictate the trajectory of our future.

So, as ambiguous and motiviation speak-inspired as this may sound, perhaps we should all try to live our lives as the Silent Farsighted Potato, I mean, Musician.

Maturity is not feeling the need to be mature.

Yesterday I sat in a laundromat for a good chunk of the afternoon. Understandably, I expected it to be a fairly brain-numbing and/or depressing experience. I was pleasantly surprised, however, when I started to feel a bizarre sense of peace and happiness, which I don’t think came about just because the reality couldn’t have been much worse than my expectations (see unbelievably undeveloped March 1 expectation-related post) or that sunlight was streaming through the windows onto white bright walls and washing machines (see environment-related posts). Seeing as I had a lot of time in which to do nothing other than try (unsuccessfully) to eat my yoghurt without a spoon, I found myself trying to figure out the root of this unexpected Saturday afternoon tranquility, and I came up with this:

I was in the silent company of ordinary people doing an ordinary mundane task. For everybody, however, that mundane task was playing a small but important role in the smooth progression of their lives. In a laundromat, everyone is equal and everyone can experience the rarity that is parallel yet uncompetitive and harmonious progress, something which you can’t even find in other ordinary mundane tasks. Everybody at the supermarket, for example, is there for the same general purpose of buying groceries, but think about the unspoken competition between the yummy mummies in the baby food aisle. One wants to be seen buying organic, another wants to buy the supermarket’s own brand to appear thrifty, etc. [You could argue that in the laundromat there is competition between underwear sizes, but in my case, and for the sake of this post, all clothing was well hidden in washers or dryers, out of sight and out of mind.]

I was then reminded of something I learnt when reading the article ‘5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy But Won’t‘ the other day: Nigeria has the highest percentage of happy people than any other country in the world (click here for the 2003 BBC News article). Perhaps one reason for this is that, for want of a drastically better analogy, more Nigerians are spending time at the laundromat than at the supermarket. They’re not faced on a daily basis with the same overwhelming number of possible routes to ‘happiness’ that many worryingly materialistic, wasteful and ignorant nations present, so they don’t worry so much about choosing the right ones. They’ve then got more time and energy to invest in feeling satisfied about getting their laundry done, as it were. And, incidentally, maybe this explains the mysterious but ever-appreciated optimism in my own family, my mum having been born in Nigeria and her parents having lived there for twenty years.

I think it’s time to fold up this post before the analogy gets dry… Excuse me while I pack my undies and search for the next flight to Africa.

I just changed my new phone’s wallpaper to a picture of a sunset over Golden Gate Bridge, taken from somewhere up high and looking a long way into the distance (and a little less ominous than the one shown here). I instantly felt more relaxed, positive and the happy realisition of the relative insignificance of so many things, and then I thought all over again what I thought when I was at the top of the CN Tower (see Jan 6 post, ‘Your Country Needs YOU (in Snow and in Health)‘, containing empty promise that I would explain the ‘CN Tower Effect’). To slightly expand on my Feb 2 ponderings, ‘A New Month, a New Hero‘, (and Alain de Botton’s well-developed insights):

Healthy mental perspective can begin with beautiful, broad physical perspective. The world would be a happier place if we all lived on top of a green grassy hill. In theory.

The bunny is back! After Spring Break, pre-Spring Break stress and post-Spring Break exhaustion, I’m finally fed, watered and raring to resume that never ending hair-climbing journey once again. After nearly three weeks off, due largely to an extended period of snow and of brain saturation similar to my mental complaint of Jan 24 (‘Fight or flight, filter or freeze‘), it’s difficult to know where to begin, especially after a welcome change in my physical location from Rochester NY to the Dominican Republic (pity me!) and the resulting changes in my mental outlook and focus, as my Feb 2 (‘A new month, a new hero‘) self would have predicted.

One thing I feel compelled to mention on my return is how reassuring it’s been to read back over some of my posts (as I had hoped way back on New Year’s Day 2010) and realise that I, and probably all of us, seem to have some kind of pattern, repetition and cohesion in our moods and perspectives. It looks like I’ve always somehow got (or ‘gotten’ as my US neighbo[u]rs would say) myself out of ruts, either proactively or simply by waiting for time to pass. With more self-awareness, particularly awareness of how and why we got to where we are (and of where we’re probably going) we’re able to stop ourselves from blowing our negative feelings and experiences out of proportion by seeing how they play a small but necessary role in the grand scheme of ups and downs. Even in my first paragraph today I made reference to two past posts; it seems I’m feeling the same as the person I was two or so months ago, and it also seems I survived these past two months to tell this tale. By purging thoughts from brain to blog, they can then be catalogued in cyber storage space for us to use in the future.

Googling ‘blogging-induced catharsis’ just now I came across an article in the Washington Post, ‘Cyber-Catharsis: Bloggers Use Web Sites as Therapy‘. There’s always further reassurance in knowing you’re not alone. So, here I begin my mission to urge you to start or continue to blog, diarise, doodle, record yourself yodeling, film yourself interpretatively belly dancing etc. – anything to help you keep tabs on your dynamic self. You might be pleasantly surprised. At the very least it should save the life of a goat or two (see wikipedia article on ‘Cathartic Sacrifice‘, and then just say no).

So much rests on expectation. More later.