For those of you slighty familiar with my biography - I walked "out of music" about 10 years ago, after 20+ years spent IN it - professionally, from age earlier than age of my son right now.....and occasionally - a lot of time - it hunts me, this professional conditioning so deep I think it is now in my bones.
So I taught a little bunch of toddlers today. Taught them solfege....just the very very beginnings - what are notes, what are keys, where do notes live and how are keys organized....and for the first time in SUCH a long time I felt comfortable, comfortable not because of my exceptional "talent" of a teacher (I think I actually have very little of that alltogether) but rather because this felt good, it felt as I was practicing something in which I am a pro, a real expert, something so deeply "in" that it just feels competely natural, even when the expessive media is new and foreign - like teaching toddlers...
I can't feel anything like that doing anything else. I am a good - even great - professional, and I can probably do anything I set my mind upon. But whatever I do - no matter how successfully - I can't stop feeling like a phony. Because it is not something THAT deeply engrained and it is not something - ever - to which I have had so much exposure that it fused to my bones and skin....thus no matter what I do it is never as "pro" as anything related to piano or music...sad and scary.
Now....I am curious to find out how people do things they learn so "late" in life like professions decided upon in college....if nothing is "fused" deeply in childhood - does it make it easier for one to become proficient in something or do people just never really question how "them" is what they do?
P.S. The picture of course is from my dear dear friend and great inspiration....Vita Usova.
4 comments:
YULECHKA- I AM SO PROUD OF YOU!!!
This is an incredible feeling you described, and I wish that it stays with you:) congratulations on your new beginning!
I was not as fortunate to become a true professional in one thing. I think it is a great asset, rather than a burden.
I was/am good in many different things, but never took one hobby or profession to the perfection that I probably could if I put enough time and effort into it.
Now as I got older, I am starting to feel like a pretender or an amateur in EVERYTHING I do, and as other obligations and my aging (and more tired) body eat away at my time, combined with laziness, I don't continue to improve in anything...
I think what you have is a great gift. This is something that will remain with you until the end, and will probably leave you after your wits will. I read a story about an Alzheimer's patient, who grew up a religious jew, saying the same prayers three times a day every day all his life... He was already at the "vegetable" stage, he couldn't speak and he didn't recognize anybody. Yet he could sing and say all the words to all the prayers... It became part of his soul, not his mind...
and i didn't even know. huh. i should read this more often.
i don't have anything comparable to your training, as you know. but i always wanted to "sculpt life", so to speak.
with this little crack of a wall to medical field that a m.therapy license offers to me, it's the closest i came so far to realization of my potential.
it does feel unbelievably good to do what i do. and i am not talking about spa job, really. yet it's so far from the "real thing" i could have been doing.
i do get your words, i know how good such good may feel...
You raise wonderful questions. I've been chastised recently for offering too many opinions.. but I will quote Rilke... about "living into the questions"... because that's really all anybody can do. I am a happy dilletante, though I've been competent and paid at several "jobs."
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