Being sure, being ready
Being sure, being ready
Practicing is a hot topic among musicians, teachers, parents, and students. I’ve written about it a lot. It’s important because practicing is how we learn. It’s relevant to everyone, musician or not, because we all practice things. We all prepare, in some way, when we want to be ready for something. We want to feel sure our efforts will succeed before we try. But what does it take to be truly ready?
When I was just finishing college and starting to look for a way forward into a career as a musician, or at the very least as an adult, I had a bunch of friends and acquaintances who were in the same position. One of them was an outrageously talented person from a whole family of musicians. He finished college and got a job directing choirs at a private high school in his hometown. He wanted to continue his studies, but he liked his work, and he thought he should stay there another year or two, to try to save money and build up his skills a bit more before attempting graduate school. Sounds like a prudent, responsible decision, right? He had the forethought to make sure he would be ready for bigger challenges, so he could take the greatest advantage of the opportunities he might encounter.
But when he asked his mom (also a professional musician) for advice, she told him not to wait. You’d think a mother would want to protect her child, keep him from making mistakes, or maybe keep him close to home a little longer. But this mama gave her baby bird a verbal push out of the nest. She told him,
“If you wait until you’re ready, you’ll never go.”
A decade or so later, he’s enjoying a successful choral conducting career that, in some alternate timeline, he might still be plugging away at a high school teaching job trying to “get ready” for.
I, personally, am never ready. When my alarm goes off, I’m not ready to be done sleeping. When it’s bedtime, I’m not ready to put down or turn off whatever I’m occupied with. Things have been like this since forever; my kindergarten teacher told my parents I was “not good with transitions.” There may never have been a single time in my life that I left the house for a class or an appointment having accomplished everything I wanted to do before going. I rarely start playing the organ on Sunday morning thinking, “Oh yeah, I’ve definitely practiced this enough.” I don’t mean to say that I’m not prepared - of course I do practice sufficiently and plan for my work. I just don’t feel ready.
But, readiness (or should I say, lack thereof) notwithstanding, I do an awful lot of things. Well or poorly, with the expected results or totally unanticipated ones, I do things anyway. If I gave only the performances I felt I was ready to give, I would never have opened my mouth or touched a keyboard in front of an audience in my whole life. And that doesn’t mean that I’ve never felt ready for a performance. In fact, I feel ready for a lot of my performances. I’ve only gotten to this point by pushing through the sense of unreadiness.
You’re never ready before you do something. You don’t need to be. Once you start, then you are ready. Starting is what makes you ready. You probably won’t feel sure that it’s going to work out, but it will.
I’m never sure, either. But this is just like being ready - it’s a psychological red herring. You don’t need to be sure ahead of time. Now, I recall being sure about one or two things in the past. Funny thing is, I turned out to be entirely wrong about those things. So feeling sure ahead of time means exactly nothing. You can’t predict the future. You can and should try to anticipate it accurately, but you just cannot ever know how a thing will go until it happens.
Some of the best things I now have in my life were things I was really not sure about. I wasn’t so sure about moving to California. I wasn’t sure I’d be good at any of the jobs I’ve ever accepted. I wasn’t sure I would even be comfortable training martial arts, let alone ever be any good at it. All of these things, I tried anyway. I embraced the possibility that it could suck, that it could go wrong, that I could fail. I faced those possibilities and my fear of them. I didn’t deny them, but I let them come with me on my journey. How many wonderful experiences I would have sacrificed if I had refused to share space with uncertainty!
You can’t live your life waiting for guarantees. Don’t be sure. Don’t be ready. Just go.
