A Hard Kind of Wisdom
What to do with a gift the world may never notice
Image: gstarschool.charterschoolsusa.com
Have you ever felt that you have more to offer than anyone realizes? And have you also felt that despite your goodness, your talent, your insight — somehow it isn’t landing; that people fail to appreciate, or even see, what’s in you? I suspect quite a lot of people feel this way, and that it’s a quiet source of real pain and confusion.
I was a music major in my undergraduate years, and every so often we’d sit in on seminars with the graduate students, many of them modern classical composers. I noticed that whenever a presenter finished and opened the floor, one of them would invariably lead off with the same question: “How do we get our music out there, and actually listened to?”
It was a genuine ache for them. They knew they were highly skilled — bold, original, doing things few people could pull off compositionally. And yet few people cared. Once, they hatched a plot to overthrow Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the Mozart piece that won the local classical station’s top-100 countdown every single year. They organized a call-in campaign to unseat it. It won that year anyway, as usual.
A more extreme example — this one fictional — of the need to be truly seen comes in the film My Left Foot, which tells the moving, difficult story of Christy Brown. Born with severe cerebral palsy to a poor Dublin family, Christy is assumed by almost everyone to be barely there — no one home behind the eyes. The exception is his mother, who never quite stops believing there’s a whole person inside.
Then one day Christy girds himself for a desperate attempt to break through. Using his one functional limb, he grips a piece of chalk between his quivering toes and scrawls MOTHER on the floor of their house. He’s done it. And everything changes — because they finally see what had been locked inside him all along. His father, beaming, lifts him up, carries him to the pub, throws open the door and declares: “This is Christy Brown, my son. Genius.”
Christy's story, for all its hardship, ends in triumph. In a finale almost too neat to believe, he transcends his limitations so completely that he becomes a celebrated writer and painter — carried, by sheer force of spirit, from a prison of a body to a voice the world couldn't ignore. But what about the people who never get the against-all-odds ending wrapped in a bow? What of the countless gifted actors and painters and singers who simply never break through? For every one spot on Broadway, there must be ten thousand people who could have filled it just as well. How do you move forward when you've heard "thank you — next!" enough times?
There are two cheap answers to this existential question and one tough, but real one. One cheap approach is to say, “never give up! If you want it bad enough you will get there.” This is simply untrue. You may get there but making false promises in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is unkind. Another dime store direction is to make light of the dream; to suggest something like “you have so many good things in your life, just focus on those.” This sidesteps real pain and longing and insults the real grief of the unrewarded. There is, however, a third—tough wisdom— way.
There’s an idea I’ve come across — effortless striving — and it means honoring both halves of an equation most of us try to escape. On one side: don’t deny your need to be seen — on a stage, in a relationship, anywhere it matters. Don’t pretend it’s nothing, because for a lot of people it’s everything. Strive with all your might for the result you want. But on the other side — and this is the part that takes a lifetime — strive just as hard to become fully at peace with never getting it.
It sounds like a contradiction. It isn't. There is a real beauty in striving with everything you have for something you want — you should. It's part of what makes a life vivid. And there is a second beauty, quieter and harder-won, in not being chained to whether you get it. The two can live in the same person at the same time: the full reach toward the result, and the open hand around it. You don't have to choose between wanting it completely and being free. The wanting is beautiful. So is the freedom.
Ahhh, now you're talking to me where I live ;)
"...a voice the world couldn't ignore"
In my younger years as a member of a prominent North American orchestra, I sat on many audition panels to select a musician to fill a vacancy. The cohort was usually enormous and the process could span several days. These were "screened" auditions, meaning the panel was behind a curtain, and a carpet runner from the entry door to the music stand ensured that we could not tell the gender of the player by their footfalls.
Among the dozen or so colleagues listening from the audition panel table, was an older, somewhat jaded gentleman. He brought along the day's newspaper, presumably for when he lost interest in the current applicant. Thing was, he'd turn the pages rather noisily. I caught his eye at one point with a questioning look. He simply said, "they have to force me to stop reading". Painful? Yes. Disrespectful? For sure! But, he was right.
I dunno...as you said, striving with everything you have is a beautiful thing. I feel though, that the striving has to be through a search--through the soul and the spirit, both of the artist (okay, instrumentalist in this case), and of the music (in my experience) they are projecting into the physical domain. This is more philosophy and metaphysics than wood-shedding will get you in a practice room.
If more aspiring artists pondered, as Paulo Coelho says in "The Witch of Portobello" (p.99), "....that moment when a note of music ends, but the next one has not yet begun", they might find themselves slowing down, opening up to the silence between their thoughts, and being receptive to what the universe has to teach them. At the very least, it can shut off the ego's endless chatter for a time.