It's a tricky, risky business

I love this picture.  I took it in a forest on the coast of the Baltic Sea in Kaliningrad, Russia.  I like it because it's a road to anywhere.  Is it a road in?  Is it a road out?  Is it safe?  Will I be eaten by bears?  Who knows?  It is the possibility of adventure that makes it enticing.  But adventure doesn't mean safe.  Adventure is risky.  Dangerous, even.  You might lose everything.  But you could gain a life.   


Being a musician is an adventurous, risky business.  It's risky because there's no guarantee of success, and certainly no guarantee of making a good living.  Or even a poor living.  We do it for the love of it - the love of the music, the love of the instrument.  The life that goes along with it...well, there's not always a lot to love about that.  But it's certainly an adventure.  The life you THINK you will have usually has no resemblance to the life you end up with.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, but you have to be willing to be flexible.  You have to have an imagination and see possibilities where there are none.  You have to accept a new definition of normal when it comes to your work schedule, your relationships and your income (when you have one).  Most importantly, you have to be willing to fail - fail spectacularly at times - and get back up on the horse and do it all again the next day.  You have to be willing to grab the next pile of music, decide what needs the most work and get cracking.    


I wish life could be as simple as that.  Life is full of beginnings and endings, moving from one experience and life changing event to the next.  Sometimes we have the time to bask in the glow of beautiful moments, and sometimes we are forced to endure the limbo that comes after something tragic.  At other times we can flit from one success to another, and then again at times we are forced to just pick up our tools and move on to the next disaster before we are ready.  Or it's some combination of these scenarios.  The key is surviving the transition in the middle.  Are we going from a Dark Place to a Light Place? Or are we going from a Dark Place to an Even Darker Place?  Or do we have no idea where we are going at all?  


Starting over is a dangerous business, and sometimes a fearful one.  You leave behind all your previous successes and failures (a blessing) and strike off into a new territory.  You have 2 choices - you can be afraid, or you can be excited.  I suppose you could be a little of both, but what a shame if your fear gets in the way of your ability to discover something new and unexpected.  Fear takes all the joy out of the unexpected and turns it into a mind game for anticipating disaster.  I am generally not a fearful person but I have a few biggies: being alone, spiders, and being alone with spiders.  A good friend told me that everybody is afraid of being alone, so maybe I'll take that one off the list and just chalk it up to being human.  The spiders you already know about.  Combine that with being alone, and you've got a monumental phobia.  Don't worry - I'm working on it.  I think my biggest fear really is that tomorrow will look exactly the same as today, and before you know it months, even years, have gone by and you won't notice because you were hypnotized by the sameness of your routine.  That, to me, is a living death.  But the danger of always needing something "different" is that it can drive you to make the wrong choices for the sake of change.  It's a tricky, risky business.


But I like life with a little risk.  I like the adventure of doing something I haven't done before, learning new skills, throwing myself into something I believe in, even if it's not a sure thing.  It keeps life fresh and interesting.  It also makes life meaningful.  Have I been doing that lately?  Not really. This probably is the cause of my current state of antsy-ness and dissatisfaction with life in general.  I'm in one of those times when I'm stuck in that limbo transition from a Dark Place to Who Knows What.  I'm game for the Who Knows What - I just hate the feeling of making the journey alone.  But sometimes that what life requires.  You do, after all, have to figure SOME things out on your own before you take the journey.  Gotta pack your own suitcase.  Overpack, and you'll have too much baggage and get too tired to go far.  Underpack and you'll be unprepared for what awaits you.  It's a tricky, risky business.  


Safe is overrated.  The truth is, you're never really safe.  At any moment in time a strong wind can come through and blow your applecart over.  And if you base your entire world of happiness around keeping all the apples in the cart, then you are going to be very miserable.  I can deal with a few overturned apples.  I just hope I don't get so beat up by the debris blowing around in the wind that I lose the will to keep refilling the cart.