It began with a meeting with someone who had come to our
Pentatonics Jazz Concert and was impressed enough to inquire about future
opportunities for kids concerts. My favorite topic! I felt my energy rising as
I talked, left the café with a warm handshake and went out to do some errands.
I noticed a new lightness in my step and a smile starting to emerge. Was it a
coincidence that after two straight weeks of fog, the sun had finally come out?
Suddenly the world was shining brightly and because my shouldered burdens had
started to slip away, everyone who walked by seemed less weighted down as well.
“All things change when we do” said the old Japanese poet Kukkai and he was
right.
It has been a brutal few weeks of pushing the heavy stone of
arranging workshops, flights, book inventories, concert invitations and the
like up the hill and everytime I felt like I reached the summit, in came 10
e-mails with action items and deadlines. Down the stone rolled to the bottom of
the hill and off I went again. Sisyphus, I know exactly how you must have felt.
But today, on the verge of two weeks of travels, the stone
stayed balanced on the top and I could stretch and feel a taste of the freedom
of actually living instead of constantly preparing to live.
Heck, maybe I’ll just push it off the other side— it really is
exhausting rolling that thing uphill day after day! But dream on. Ain’t no
joyful livin’ in today’s world without the ant-like patience and detail work of
arranging things. At least in my field of music teaching and music concerts.
And as I’ve written several times recently (Seed Planting/ Bean Counting, for
example), the ant’s meticulous labor and the grasshopper’s spontaneous fiddling
each carry their own pleasure. (I can feel my high school English teacher
breathing down my neck here, red pencil poised: “How did the ant and
grasshopper get mixed up with Sisyphus? And wouldn’t they both be crushed when
the stone rolled down? No mixed metaphors, young man! “)
Complaining to my men’s group buddies last night, one of
them mentioned the closing sentence to Camus’ essay, where he compared the old
Greek myth to the countless business tasks of contemporary society, If I
remember correctly from high school English class, the essay was mostly about
the absurdity and futility of modern life. And yet he closes thus:
“The struggle itself [...] is enough to fill a man's
heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
Well, maybe. But my happiness came from the moment of
release, about to board the plane to Calgary, Beijing, Yokohama and Tokyo to do
the real work I’m meant to do.
But first I gotta pack.
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