I Can Want Without Needing
I scribbled this down after playing a particularly fun and free three sets at Verdure last Thursday night. I played three hours of music and the ideas came out like turning on a faucet. Mannnn, I was burnin.’ I came home, took Chops out for a little walk and xixi, and when we got back home, my fingers starting moving on the keyboard…
For more than half my life, I knew I wanted to live my life as a musician. Besides for a small almost detour into early childhood education and a small/laughably brutal detour into being a husband, it’s been 23 years of wanting to move through my days with my bass in my hands. This has been one of my deepest and longstanding desires.
Ever since my brain injury, I’ve had a very complicated with wanting something so badly that didn’t seem to want me. Maybe you can relate to that. So I’ve had to really dive deep into what kind of desire makes sense in my life right now. And I noticed something…
I am playing differently and playing better. Not with less desire, if anything there is more. But simply less hurry around it. Less grabbing, less proving. More listening.
In music, urgency used to masquerade as intensity. Prove your worth, fill the silence, get to the good part faster, etc. Make something happen now or they’ll never dig you! It worked sometimes of course, which is how I learned to keep on that path. But other times it just created drag. This became extra tension in my hands, extra noise in the room, extra pressure on the moment to deliver something it wasn’t ready to give yet.
What I’m learning is that desire doesn’t need a deadline. In fact, it seems to actively hate that shit!
A groove wants to arrive when the conditions are right. When the body settles like it just got home from work. When the room exhales like it was just given a cup of tea. When attention sharpens instead of scatters. You can feel it coming before it shows up like those Atlanta summer rainstorms. And if you rush it, it doesn’t get better. It kind of runs away screaming leaving you feeling unwanted and quite weird.
There’s a difference between wanting to play well and chasing goodness. Urgency wants results. Desire just wants a relationship. It makes me think of a Gardner vs a Mechanic (playing at Verdure always makes me think in plant terms, because it looks like a beautiful garden in there)…
A mechanic diagnoses a problem and fixes it. They identify a broken part and apply pressure until it works again. A gardener doesn’t give a fuck about conclusions but just focuses on conditions such a soil, water, light, timing. You can’t argue with a plant to make it grow faster. You can’t tighten a screw and expect a root to respond. In music, I think I have been asking “why isn’t this working yet?” Now I am starting to naturally ask “what would help this grow.”
I am trusting the seasons of this music thing with patience and quiet daily tending. Less fixing, more cultivating. If I show to the bass tuned up and curious, the music will meet me there.
I think the same approach applies everywhere, but music makes it obvious for me: you can’t harvest an unripe fruit. You can only tend the conditions and wait for the moment when effort becomes unnecessary.
When it comes, you’ll know.
And if it doesn’t, that’s fine too.
No rush :)
