Today is December 31st, 2023 – my 40th birthday. As I wrote at the end of my previous post, I have big dreams for this decade. At Christmas, my father-in-law told me that your forties were when you really bite down on your goals, you get aggressive with taking what you’re doing to the next steps and that’s very much how I feel. I’m ready to dig deep into teaching and into writing.
Presence
I think for the last half of my thirties, my mind was never really where my body was. If I was at work, I was thinking about family or writing; if I was writing, I was feeling badly that I wasn’t spending more time with my family; if I was with my family, I was thinking about what I needed to get done at work – it was like a circle. A big part of that was a bad pattern of thinking and I just got lost in it. A bunch of it came to a head last winter in almost every part of my life and, truth be told, it was brutal… but it was necessary and it snapped me out of it. I spent a lot of 39th year really trying to be present, to really be where I am. If I’m working, I’m working; if I’m with my family, I’m right there with them; if I’m writing, that’s all I’m thinking about.
Presence is something I’m really focused on right now and I want it to be a big goal for my forties. It frees me from the perception of keeping all the plates spinning or all of the balls in the air because I can just focus on one thing at a time. It makes me a better teacher, better dad, better husband, and better composer.
There’s a terrific episode of the Band Room Podcast where Jason Caslor and Dylan Maddix talk about focus and distraction, which helped get me started on this line of thinking. It was the thing I needed to hear at the time I needed to hear it.
Have a Clear Vision
I’ve been reading Arnold Schwarzenegger’s self-help book, Be Useful, and while I’m often leary of self-help books, this one is resonating with me. It’s written in the way he speaks – I can hear his voice through the text – and so often he’s balancing between “I have empathy for you” and “get your butt in gear and get moving.”
While I like a lot of it, his first prompt of “have a clear vision” really resonated with me, and I think that’s because it made me realize that I hadn’t really had a clear vision for quite some time. There was a lot of “whatever happens happens” and “I’ll just do my best,” which is hardly a vision. I noticed this when the culture of band room was starting to change over the last few months, and usually my teaching partner and I have our finger on that pulse, but without the adults having a clear vision of how things go in the room, it leaves too much room for the kids to set the culture and, though there are good kids everywhere, that’s not their responsibility, it’s the teachers’.
The same is true with my creative work. I hadn’t had a clear vision for my writing because the other aspects of my life (primarily teaching and home life) were overwhelming. But like presence in one’s life, if I can just have a vision for teaching, home, and composing then I don’t have to worry about the extraneous things in each aspect. Of course, that’s within reason for all of those things – I still have to do performance reflections or report cards at work, I still have to drive my kids to skating lessons, and I still have to respond to emails about composing. It’s not a silver bullet, but at least I can narrow the focus and move forward in a direction. I can have a clear vision of what I want. I can do things that move me closer to that vision and not do things that detract from it.
(Again, within reason. There needs to be some leisure activity in there somewhere, right?)
So, what is my clear vision?
Teaching: Use resources and bring in clinicians to expand my toolbox of rehearsal strategies to improve my teaching, particularly of Jr. Symphonic, Jazz Band, and Jazz Improv.
Family: Be present and focus on my family when we’re together.
Composing: Write enough to be creatively satisfied (and I’ll narrow this more as I figure it out)
The last one is tricky because what does “creatively satisfied” even mean? To me, it means to not shy away from doing the work that I know nourishes me. It’s like exercising: Even if you’re tired, you’ll feel better if you go. There are days where I don’t want to go, but if I just get changed, then I can do it. For composing, if I just sit at the piano and start playing, then I’m in it and I’m ready.
At the suggestion of my high school band teacher, I read Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art and it focuses on doing the work. Just do the work. There are a million reasons not to do it – you’re tired, you’re stressed, you’re busy, you’ve had a long day, but you just need to do the work. It’s not going to do itself – you’re the only one who can do it.
Now, granted, he also writes in the book that he only writes from 10am-2pm, as opposed to my 8pm or 9pm until whenever, so that’s a change, but he’s mostly right. The change in mindset for me is that I need to change the way I think about it. It can’t be work, that’s not helpful; it needs to be writing. It needs to be about the creative experience and that’s the framework I’m moving forward with.
I’m looking forward to this decade. I’m working on presence and I have a clear vision.
Let’s get started.
-Kenley