Patience and Humility

Eating a bit of humble pie tonight. I went into the studio with an aggressively optimistic idea of what I was going to get done. Fact is, I haven’t rehearsed in over a week, and Friday saw the fulfillment of a year-long effort to produce an event for over 450 people.

In all of the compressing time of the last couple weeks, I’ve always felt like everything was happening exactly as it should. I’d finish doing one big 4 or 6 hour task exactly in time to start the next, and everything just sorta flowed together. Took a fair amount of sprinting and dodging (and a deliriously minimal amount of sleep), but everything worked out.

And things haven’t just been working out… They’ve been happening with magic with a dreamlike shimmer. Could be the sleep depro, but I’m feeling fairly caught up.

So tonight I go into the studio, thinking I’m just gonna bang out a few ace renditions of songs for the demo, edit ’em and have ’em ready to go in a couple hours.

“As if…”

Tonight’s session was lackluster at best, and reflective of both my languid rehearsal schedule and my (recovered, but still) exhausted body. I thought I was just gonna nail it, and instead, I ended up getting mired.

I’m right now reminded of something I told my mom earlier on the phone today – my job is to just keep doing what there is to do, and everything else is going to work out just fine.

Fact is, I’m incredibly impatient. I want to get the demo done yesterday, and start reaching out to the music industry contacts I know. At the same time, I’m well aware of not REALLY being ready for what I’m looking for. I still have work to do, and the hardest part about it isn’t doing it. It’s in the anticipation of being done, I suppose.

But in this iterative process called “Life”, I suppose there never really IS “done”. Just “Done for now”, I guess.

So I’m not gonna have a demo ready for this weekend. Rus was brilliant tonight in supporting me – saying that he really felt I “had better [performances in me” and I know he’s right. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I’d just stroll into the studio without having played a note for a week until a cram rehearsal last night. And cramming just don’t work with stuff like this. It’s all about consistency. And patience.

So OK, God. Lesson learned. Again.

Back to my regularly schedule episode of “Trusting Life”