Alan Fletcher On Music

I'm thinking a lot about work (still). Maybe it's one of those questions that will always be with me. Most people go to work for a certain amount of time and it takes up a good deal of their lives, and of the people I know, most don't really enjoy their jobs. Oh, there are parts of each job, maybe, that they'll like, but overall, not really. And I have to admit I've been that person. Who hasn't?

I still have so many questions about work and fulfillment and meaning. Reading this article gave me a little more perspective. There's a difference between a job and work, right? Between what you do for a living and who you are as a human being? I think so.

Alan Fletcher (president and CEO of the Aspen Music Festival and School) is speaking about music, but I really think his words apply to anything you love to do, even if you're not doing it full-time, even if you're not getting paid for it. Because not everything is measured in money or externally praised. Maybe some things you just have to do.

 

"I believe in you, in your gifts, and especially in your ability to use very hard, purposeful work to make something of lasting value from those gifts."

 -Alan Fletcher

 

"The music is the mission, not the money."
-Alan Fletcher

"Meanwhile, you are here to do the beautiful work that is the heart of our whole profession. You have made a profound choice in your lives, a choice for music. You have followed up that choice with an immense amount of hard work."
-Alan Fletcher

For full article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2013/07/08/200002444/music-is-the-mission-not-money

To hard work - at your job, certainly, but also on something you love to do.

Artists Don't Stop

I read this article (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/nyregion/discovered-at-64-a-brooklyn-artist-takes-his-place.html?nl=nyregion&emc=edit_ur_20130605&_r=0) the other day, and found it inspirational. It's a brief profile of a 64-year old artist, Rafael Leonardo Black, who was recently "discovered."

For thirty years - "day after day, year by year, he labored like a monk [on his art]," while making his living "as a typist in a law firm, a salesman at Gimbels and then Macy’s, and as a secretary in a school. Most recently, he has worked mornings as a part-time receptionist in a hospital."

“I never expected to be able to make a living at it, but I’ve always done it since — well, I guess, since I’ve known my self.”
-Rafael Leonardo Black

"What I do is read and make my pictures. To rip off Max Ernst, you keep one eye on what’s going on outside, and one eye focused inside. Then you make things that say something to both.”
-Rafael Leonardo Black 

Well past the usual age of discovery for an emerging artist, Mr. Black notes that he is not news to himself.

“People who become what are called artists don’t stop,” he said. “There’s a saying: ‘Everybody writes poems at 15; real poets write them at 50.’ ” 

To writing poetry or  reading and making pictures or whatever it is that you do at 50, 60, 70...as long as you live. To not stopping.

Inspiration from Ari Cohen, of the blog Advanced Style

(For full article: http://www.npr.org/2013/04/01/174767233/-a-lovely-feeling-celebrating-older-women-with-fabulous-style)

"I didn't set out to be a photographer or a writer," he [Ari Cohen] says. "I just wanted to do something that I felt inspired by and start sharing it with people."

Simple, right? Maybe we don't have to start out with detailed five-year plans or even any clear idea of what we want to do...maybe we just need to start (for now, at least).

And one more thing - "Ilona Royce Smithkin, 93, is one of Cohen's most famous subjects...[art that she has made over a decades-long career] never brought her fame. The Advanced Style blog has. Now, she gets modeling jobs. She's on billboards. People recognize her on the streets of New York.
 
""It's a lovely feeling," she says, "like you are part of the world and the world is part of you.""

I'm pretty amazed by the fact that she's 93 and this whole new phase of her life- the modeling and recognition for her style - is happening now. Sometimes it feels like things aren't happening, or they're never going to happen. Dreams are completely out of reach (except perhaps in sleep). Only, the unexpected, the unpredictable...well, they do happen. You can live out your dreams.

To doing something that both inspires us and others. And of course, living out your dreams.

Tim Walker, Dreams, and Magic

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evelyne-politanoff/tim-walker-story-teller-photos_b_1970997.html?utm_hp_ref=style&ir=Style

With an imagination that knows no bounds, Tim Walker turns fashion shoots into fairytales or, in his own words, "daydreams into photographs."
-Evelyn Politanoff

I haven't read this book or seen this exhibition, nor am I really familiar with Tim Walker's work, but I love that phrase, turning "daydreams into photographs." It's magical, isn't it? Not to sound like a five-year-old (or maybe to bring out the five-year-old in you, too, so we can once again recognize magic), but well, isn't it magical? Turning a little bit of nothing into something...fluff into something more concrete. Dreams into reality, a little bit, anyway.

"Sometimes when you're taking a picture an extraordinary sense of luck and chance takes over and propels you to make pictures that you could't in your wildest dreams have imagined. This is the magic of photography."
-Tim Walker

I'm not much of a photographer, but I think I know what he's talking about when he discusses making something "that you could[n]'t in your wildest dreams have imagined," don't you?

To turning dreams into reality and creating what we can't (even in our wildest dreams) imagine. To magic.

Dear Sugar

So I was at work today, listening to a podcast (The Writer's Block...PBS?) and it was one of those podcasts that make you stop working and start listening. Not just the type of listening like the way you listen to music mindlessly while working, but listening the way you listen when you can't do anything but listen because what you're listening to compels you to Just Listen (anybody else read that Sarah Dessen book?). That kind of listening.

I was listening to an excerpt from Tiny Beautiful Things (http://www.amazon.com/Tiny-Beautiful-Things-Advice-Sugar/dp/0307949338), which I'd heard about and had been curious about but hadn't read. And now it's on my to-read list. I'm not sure how long it'll take me to get the book (let's just say the list is a long one and leave it at that), but I definitely want to read it.

This is an excerpt from the excerpt she read from. Find the whole column here: http://therumpus.net/2011/02/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-64/

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.
...
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.



To long meandering walks and reading and wondering, and yes, even shitty jobs, because they are "your becoming." To becoming.

Richard Russo's 2004 Commencement Speech

For the full text: http://www.colby.edu/news/detail/488/

...suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don't wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren't paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you're lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don't come with guarantees.
-Richard Russo

I don't want to wake up one day tenured to a life that happened - I want to make my life happen. To make the things that I want happen. But oh, sometimes it feels so far away, doesn't it?

Search out the kind of work that you would gladly do for free and then get somebody to pay you for it. Don't expect this to happen overnight. It took me nearly twenty years to get people to pay me a living wage for my writing, which makes me, even at this juncture, one of the fortunate few. Your work should be something that satisfies, excites and rewards you, something that gives your life meaning and direction, that stays fresh and new and challenging, a task you'll never quite master, that will never be completed. It should be the kind of work that constantly humbles you, that never allows you to become smug—in short, work that sustains you instead of just paying your bills. While you search for this work, you'll need a job. For me that job was teaching, and it's a fine thing to be good at your job, as long as you don't confuse it with your work, which it's hard not to do.
-Richard Russo

I know, I know. I am obsessed with work quotes. But I can't help it, at this particular time in my life. I keep reading these quotes about doing what you love in the hopes that it will make me courageous enough to well, do it. I'm still working on it, obviously.

I have a job. But I'm still looking for my work. I wonder how many other people out there are in the same boat.

To working on the true passion of our lives and doing our own work.

Oprah's 2008 Commencement Speech

(For the full transcript of the speech, see: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2008/june18/como-061808.html)

"...walk through life eager and open to self-improvement and that which is going to best help you evolve, 'cause that's really why we're here, to evolve as human beings. To grow into more of ourselves, always moving to the next level of understanding, the next level of compassion and growth.
And I believe that there's a lesson in almost everything that you do and every experience, and getting the lesson is how you move forward."

Self-improvement can sound kind of hokey. But if you really think about it, you're trying to make yourself a better person. Who care if it sounds hokey? I want to evolve as a human being, and always keep growing.

"When you're doing the work you're meant to do, it feels right and every day is a bonus, regardless of what you're getting paid.
 ...
And how do you know when you're doing something right? How do you know that? It feels so. What I know now is that feelings are really your GPS system for life. When you're supposed to do something or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know...If it doesn't feel right, don't do it. That's the lesson...There are many times when you don't know what to do. When you don't know what to do, get still, get very still, until you do know what to do."

I'm going to keep searching for the work I'm meant to do. So far, I've learned about the work I'm not meant to do. And you know what? That's part of finding what you are meant to do. 

"...forget about the fast lane. If you really want to fly, just harness your power to your passion. Honor your calling. Everybody has one. Trust your heart and success will come to you.
...
But having a lot of money does not automatically make you a successful person. What you want is money and meaning. You want your work to be meaningful. Because meaning is what brings the real richness to your life. What you really want is to be surrounded by people you trust and treasure and by people who cherish you. That's when you're really rich."

There are so many different definitions of success. Mine includes doing meaningful work. I want to be excited to go off to work in the morning and find my work meaningful and be interested in things. Not just what I'm doing, but in what other people are doing, in what's happening in the world at large. (It can feel small sometimes, but a lot of things can happen out there!)

"If things go wrong, you hit a dead end—as you will—it's just life's way of saying time to change course. So, ask every failure—this is what I do with every failure, every crisis, every difficult time—I say, what is this here to teach me? And as soon as you get the lesson, you get to move on. If you really get the lesson, you pass and you don't have to repeat the class. If you don't get the lesson, it shows up wearing another pair of pants—or skirt—to give you some remedial work.
 But, if you ask the right question—not why is this happening, but what is this here to teach me?—it puts you in the place and space to get the lesson you need."

I'd like to approach failures this way. I need to work on asking what lessons are in the failures.

"This is what I know for sure: In order to be truly happy, you must live along with and you have to stand for something larger than yourself. Because life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward you have to give back. And to me, that is the greatest lesson of life. To be happy, you have to give something back. ...if you're hurting, you need to help somebody ease their hurt...
...helping others is the way we help ourselves."

I completely agree. Okay, this is going to sound kind of silly, but I helped someone find a book at the library yesterday, and it made me feel pretty happy. Yes, it's a very small act (I didn't cure cancer or facilitate peace in the Middle East or anything like that), but I helped someone when I could have chosen not to. I didn't know him. I don't work at the library. But I took the time to help him and honestly, I improved my day and his. So go out there and help someone find a book or something. Improve your day and someone else's.


"So, I know this—that whether you're an actor, you offer your talent in the way that most inspires art. If you're an anatomist, you look at your gift as knowledge and service to healing... if you choose to offer your skills and talent in service, when you choose the paradigm of service, looking at life through that paradigm, it turns everything you do from a job into a gift."

Whatever you do, think of it as a gift.

To finding the lesson, honoring your calling, and helping others.