4.12.07

It's said that being an artist is about working on your craft every day. If you're a pianist, play piano every day, even if you're uninspired; even if all that comes out are scales or even if you play the same sonata a hundred times. If you're a guitarist, play guitar every day, even if all you can muster is some tired and worn-out Neil Young cover that you've known the chords for since you were fifteen. If you're a writer, write something every day, even if it's a laundry list, or a to-do list, or a functionless anecdote that, when proofread, might make you lose any faith you ever had in the suggestion that your life is interesting. If you're a painter, throw some colors around, even if the end result is something you throw in the nearest dumpster. And then there's this: If you're a pianist, and a guitarist, and a writer, and a painter, all at once, your life is going to be busy.

And then, they say, you must get enough sleep. You must educate yourself. You must make time for friends. You must fall in love.

What they don't mention, is that sometimes you don't really have a choice about any of it. If you're truly a musician, you will have to play music. It becomes a primal need. If you're truly a writer, there will be words floating around your head that you cannot bear to let brew there without pulling out your typewriter. If you're truly a painter, you will see things each day that make you want to drop another $50 on new tubes of acrylics, and you won't be able to go to an art gallery without getting serious artist-envy and needing to go home and see whether you still have any talent or not. If you're a guitarist, any local show will remind you of the fact that you've forgotten what some chord is, or the fact that you're finger-picking is slow, or the fact that you have to watch the strings while playing. If you care about your craft, and if it's important to you, it's not so because of any conscious choice you made. It just IS. And if you neglect your guitar for too long, maybe you're not a guitarist.

Furthermore, if you have a hungry mind, a social drive, and a romantic disposition, you don't really have much of a choice regarding the other things either. You will seek knowledge and stimulus in whatever ways you can; school being one of the most straightforward ways. You will be drawn towards people naturally, because your mind needs fodder and because they provide it, or because they provide hope for fodder. You might be more social if you are seeking those individuals who most inspire your mind, because it takes a lot of socializing to find such people. And you will probably fall in love whether you want to or not, so that's really not even something worth debating about. Lastly, unless you have inhuman abilities of which all of us should be envious, you will need to sleep.

Sometimes I worry about these things - all of these things - but then I remember that these are things I will do whether I choose to or not: Perhaps to different degrees as I realize how I want to prioritize my life, but never will I abandon any one of them completely. I cannot drop those things which I consider most second-nature and most essential to the art of being a human being.