Love of the end

November 8, 2007

A lot of us musicians get this all wrong. And I have to include me in this group. Yours truly, guilty as charged.

We fall in love with results rather than process.

Up until last year this time, my family and I lived in a mud house that we built ourselves.

I kid you not. It’s a form of adobe called cob. Pages of environmental benefits. Can be built (and have been) by complete novices. Go look up “cob house” if you’re curious.

It was my wife’s idea (ahem… yes, I’d like to blame her… though my agreeing to go along is equally guilty). As I said, tons of environmental benefits. Financial benefits, too, since it can be done DIY. We pursued this building project for 7 years. This dream of ours — an eco-village/intentional community in a rural setting.

Long story short, last year we pushed the abort button and moved out of our dream-in-progress. We gave up. It hurt like hell, but we don’t regret our decision. We accomplished a lot, but we simply couldn’t keep up with the building process with our growing family — and we weren’t about to sacrifice our children for the sake of an eco-friendly DIY house. A noble cause, yes, but not as important, no.

The truth is, we loved our vision of the end result. But we didn’t love the process of getting there. She loved it more than I, and even I learned to love parts of it. But honestly, I knew I wasn’t all that thrilled about building to begin with.

We did what we did, and we don’t regret it. But if we know then what we know now, we’d do things differently.

We musicians get so stuck on the end result. Some of us don’t hide their desires for fame and fortune. Some of us pretend that we’re not in it for fame — but yet, I think it’s safe to say that all of us want our music to matter. To be revered and praised for being an “artist.” To get recognized from other artists and heros and critics, people who are supposed to “know better.”

Well, even though DRTBOT (Darkness Reveals the Beauty of Truth) is my first album, I’ve been doing music for a long time. I’ve been revered and praised, yes, thank you very much — except I’ve always had a hard time believing them. Why? B/C there are always people more revered. More accomplished. I’ve accomplished a lot, but not enough — and my prediction is that if/when I have a platinum album or Grammy, I would still be saying the exact same thing. Not enough.

That’s the problem of falling in love with the end result. Not all of it is unattainable, but the truth is, we spend 99% of the time trying to get there. So if you love the end but not the way to get there, then you’d spend that 99% being unfulfilled and dissatisfied.

Wouldn’t it be such a relief to turn it all around? Just do something b/c you love doing it. Not b/c you want to accomplish something with it. A goal as a milestone is great, but a goal as the justification, the reason for doing it, can not only rob the joy of it, but keep you from actually achieving it.

I do love making music — fortunately, I wasn’t wrong about that. But my love for what I wanted out of music was so heavy that at times it squashed the joy of it.

My wife told me tonight, “you’ll succeed only when you stop trying to prove yourself with it.”

Yes dear, you’re right. It looks like I have more shedding to do.

Filed under: Ari, Music, Reflections | Comments (0)