It seems that things started to change the moment I turned thirty. Sure, there were a few extra backaches here and there, my joints seemed to want to pop a little more frequently and vociferously, and a new vitreous floater added itself to the bits of entoptic debris cluttering my field of vision. But there was something else going on, something outside my body. My future, long seen—or unseen, really—as the result of an uncertain choice of paths through a maze linking wherever I was to wherever I wanted to be, started to emerge as something less the stuff of dreams and more as something soon to be realized.
The year had started with the same hopeful mantra, “This will be the year things start to happen.” I meant it, I suppose, but something had felt different about it this year, as if the person who said it had years more experience than the one who had said it the year before. That experienced, older soul would be surprised by nothing, and last year’s butterflies had given way to a stomach steeled for whatever was to be.
On my birthday, I got a call out of the blue about a gig playing with a singer/songwriter. Without going into too much detail here, I accepted the gig, and it appears that things are heading in the right direction. Whatever happens in that arrangement, however, the most crucial thing was my disabling the sense of inertia that had to that point kept me cooped up in my apartment, playing for audiences of one. It was what I needed to remind myself that an artist practices his art, and an artist wishing to make a living of his art must at some point involve the public. Waiting for the perfect moment is, I realized, the surest road to regret.
The year had started with the same hopeful mantra, “This will be the year things start to happen.” I meant it, I suppose, but something had felt different about it this year, as if the person who said it had years more experience than the one who had said it the year before. That experienced, older soul would be surprised by nothing, and last year’s butterflies had given way to a stomach steeled for whatever was to be.
On my birthday, I got a call out of the blue about a gig playing with a singer/songwriter. Without going into too much detail here, I accepted the gig, and it appears that things are heading in the right direction. Whatever happens in that arrangement, however, the most crucial thing was my disabling the sense of inertia that had to that point kept me cooped up in my apartment, playing for audiences of one. It was what I needed to remind myself that an artist practices his art, and an artist wishing to make a living of his art must at some point involve the public. Waiting for the perfect moment is, I realized, the surest road to regret.
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