stress test

You know you're ready for a vacation when you work at a musical institution and it feels like a luxury to sit down for a whole hour and listen to a recital. After all, people, there are like 87 of these going on at any given moment within these walls. And I almost NEVER go to listen to anything...am I just so sick of the place by five o'clock that I can't bear to spend another minute? That's part of it. Am I too busy focusing on my own set of musical challenges? Yes.

Sometimes I forget how much there is to learn by taking a freaking second and sitting down to hear someone else play. And not that it's about "learning" per se. Because then, I'm still kind of making it about myself-- a what-can-I-GET-from-this kind of attitude. At T's recital yesterday, it was really just more about turning off my brain and participating in the music on a deeper level. At the end of the recital, I heard myself say "That was exactly what I needed."

Music is my job, but I realllllly want to stop thinking of it like that for at least an hour or two a week. As a self-proclaimed goal-oriented over-achiever, it's scary the kind of drive I have to make things happen, in the process often forgetting that this is MUSIC we're talking about.