So spending a week in the wilds of Vermont doing close to nothing gives a person ample time to think. At the end of this week, restless from a day of sitting reading and watching video games I finally decided to take some initiative and take a walk. It was only five degrees outside, mind you, so it was a pretty short walk, but it had the marvelous effect of clearing my head so those thoughts could come to the surface. I came in from the cold, nose stinging and toes numb, picked up a laptop and began to write. A couple thousand words and about a half-an-hour later I stopped.
Sitting down and writing a thousand words in under twenty minutes always has the tendency to make my head feel empty and light. It's as though I've completely exhausted every original thought and my brain has to take a moment to generate more. It's a good feeling, actually--it's the closest I get to a literally clear mind. I used to be quite familiar with it.
You see, in high school I was a novelist. I wrote two books, and my output in total must have topped five hundred thousand words; but almost a decade later it's become a foreign habit. I haven’t written in months. I was thinking today that this was the first time in over a year-and-a-half that I’ve had a vacation and the first time in at least two years since I’d had a massage. Skiing yesterday was one of the first physical things I’ve done in a few months. It’s like I’ve been completely ignoring myself in favor of feeling like I’m moving forward. I have been doing that--I've been learning things and feeling like I'm gaining momentum. I’ve been getting a lot more done, but I realized today that 'getting things done' is a task that's very limiting. I've been moving forward, crossing things off my to-do list, but I haven’t been becoming a better person.
***
I remember writing some sort of rant in undergrad about singers who thought that they were only singers—that the only worthy thing they studied was voice and the only thing that concerned them was music--and even then, only their music was of any importance. They didn’t know a thing about politics or history or art or technology. Perhaps they knew a bit about marketing, but they weren’t well-rounded. I used to despise those people. I thought they were under-developed and, frankly, quite silly.
Somewhere along the way, I didn’t exactly become one of them—thank God my interest and intense curiosity in other things makes that impossible—but it seems that I started to emulate those singers.
I don’t want to be one of those singers! I don’t want to eat, sleep, breathe, and excrete music. I want to be a person! I just want to be a person who happens to sing for a living.
As I walked around in the cold today I thought to myself that music might be the thing I love to do more than anything else, but it is not the only thing I love to do. In the end, I believe that will make me a better person, and being a better person makes me a better singer.
But even if it didn’t make me a better singer, it would still make me a better person, and that is always—SHOULD always-be the real point.
***
Lesson according to Smoofie: Be a person first and a singer second.
