Four Instruments, 400 Candles

It was a hell of a week at work with the deadline, so a Candlelight concert was a nice treat. My mom and my daughter, Morgan—better known around here as MoMo—came with me for two hours of Taylor Swift, ABBA, and Queen.

Mom loves ABBA. MoMo secretly likes Taylor Swift; she just refuses to be a Swiftie. But we all really get into orchestra covers of modern songs. It’s really cool to hear what a piano or a few string instruments can do with a song you already know.

Four instruments, 400 candles, and enough sound to fill the whole room. Should be relaxing, right?

And, of course, we can’t sit still.

MoMo keeps changing positions in her chair. I’m chair dancing with absolutely no rhythm. Mom is just trying to listen to the concert.

Watching people play like that is exciting to me and always leaves me a little in awe. Partly because I would love to be able to play like them. Unfortunately, I have terrible depth perception, so reading notes quickly is a struggle, and my hands are all thumbs. I can appreciate what’s happening much more easily than I can make it happen myself.

But I also find myself wondering what it must feel like to find something you love enough to stick with it like they have. To spend all those hours practicing. To become that good. Did they always know that was what they wanted? Did they try seventeen other things first? Were there years when they wanted to quit?

From my chair, I just get to see the part where they’re good at it.

I try to give MoMo opportunities to find something she loves. Music. Making things. Different experiences. Something she might never know she liked if she didn’t get the chance to try. But then I wonder whether I’m teaching her to explore or teaching her to keep moving on.

We’re very similar. We get interested in something, want to know how it works, and learn enough to do a little of it. Then something else catches our attention-squirrel!

So apparently we have trouble sitting still in more ways than one.

And I like that about us. Mostly. There’s always something else to learn, something else to try. I don’t want her to feel like she has to pick one thing now and spend the rest of her life doing it. But I also want her to know what happens when you stay with something long enough to get past being a beginner.

Which requires staying interested when it gets difficult. Or repetitive. Or when something newer is sitting over there looking considerably more interesting.

So how do you encourage both? How do you make room for exploration and teach commitment? And how much or how little of either is she learning from watching me?

For now, she’s still very into violin, and I’m glad. I don’t know where it will go, and I don’t need to decide that for her. But I love that she has something she wants to keep doing.

Then there’s me. What’s my thing?

It’s not that I don’t like anything. I like too many things. I want to learn this, try that, figure out how somebody made something else. I get excited about things. I just don’t seem to stay excited about one thing long enough to become the person someone watches and thinks, damn, I wish I could do that.

Would I even want to do one thing that much? Or do I just like the idea of knowing what that might be?

I’m 47, and I still feel like I could do more. I just don’t always know what that means.

Maybe that’s why watching someone make music appeals to me so much after a week at work. I want to make something, too. Something I get to decide what to do with.

I spend a lot of time figuring things out, building what’s needed, and helping other people get where they’re trying to go. At work, I have a certain amount of autonomy. I can figure out how to make something happen—as long as it’s the something other people want.

Sometimes I’m trying to build it while they’re still figuring out what they asked for.

I can be busy all day, solve problems, move things forward, and still feel stuck. How does that even work?

And then I look up and wonder where the last 25 years went. I’ve been working. Raising a daughter. Taking care of things. Learning things. There’s been plenty of life in those years. But somewhere in all that internal navigation and propelling other people forward, I’m still wondering where I want to go.

Maybe that’s part of what I’m watching when I watch musicians. The talent, absolutely. But also people who, at least for that moment, seem to know exactly what they’re there to do.

I wonder what that feels like.

Anyway, the music was beautiful.

MoMo’s still playing violin.

And I’m still thinking.