Tightropes

I long for the safe spotlight - holding an audience in the palm of my hand, anonymously. I would have killed for solos in college, for that brief moment when I got to step outside of the group and prove myself, but only for a second, a brief minute, before being absorbed back into the warm comfort of a larger group. 

Wind ensembles (and orchestras) hold both some of my best and worst memories. Competition is what kept me in music, and what drew me to sports, and what keeps you alive can also kill you. I'm seven years removed from my first All-State selection, and the pride I have in that accomplishment still sits hot in my chest some days, both warming me and warning me. 

I'm older now, obviously. I'm not "the best band director in the state of Texas," as a journal from my senior year of high school amusingly posits for my future. I've lived through mental breakdown, instrumental burnout, pain and sorrow and also joy. I graduated with a very expensive degree with a major that doesn't exist outside of that narrow world of music. I've played flute maybe ten time since I graduated. It doesn't mean that music doesn't still live inside me. 

These days, the most use I get out of my degree is putting together playlists and judging the hell out of anthem singers. 

I miss performing, especially on days when the mundane world is a little to close (and then I want to slap myself, because how artsy-pretentious is that, the "mundane world," if I were my own editor I'd cut that in a hot second.) I miss the way that music gets inside the bones, can create life from ink and paper. Most of all, I miss that precipice, being balanced on that point where you're both inside and outside, selfishly wringing the music for your own meaning while trying to let the audience have theirs. 

It's hard to get this back to sports, particularly now that I've stopped typing this to conduct music at my desk multiple times. Where does it connect? That competitiveness - everyone working both together and for themselves. You thought really great music came together through pure collaboration? No more than a good team is made of up truly selfless individuals. That's the dirty side of both music and sports - to be the best, you have to be a degree of selfish. 

It's that balancing point I was talking about - that's where the best happens. You walk the tightrope, multiple tightropes, and sometimes you fall off. Sometimes you get back on the same rope. Sometimes you find a new one. 

Sometimes you end up sitting ten stories up listening to yourself from seven years ago and wondering where this tightrope goes.