Of Carrots and Chord Progressions

This past weekend, I participated in a two-day concert event put on by my guitar school.  Approximately 10 bands played three songs each on both Friday and Saturday night.  Even though things never go quite as smoothly as I hope—sometimes I feel destined to do my worst when I’m in front of an audience—it was nice to spend a whole weekend devoted to being a musician.  Not only do I enjoy the opportunity to perform, but I enjoy the validation I get from a solid performance.  When I know it went well, I feel my musicianship confirmed.  When I leave the stage and a teenager stops me as I pass by to point his finger at my chest and state with the utmost conviction, “You!  You.  Are.  A-maaa-zing!” I think maybe I’m not so crazy for feeling like music is my calling, that I really am most in my element when I’m playing it.

On Sunday night, I thought of the day job that awaited me on the morrow.  The incongruity I felt is hard to put into words.  In the past, I have tried to capture my feelings about my job by saying things like, “It feels so foreign to me,” “it feels so unlike me,” “I feel like a phony, an outsider, a pretender,” and so on.  I worry these descriptions conjure the wrong ideas in other people’s minds, however.  One could easily suppose I hate my job, that I find it depressing or miserable.  But I don’t think those descriptions are accurate, at least not a majority of the time.  Instead, my job feels like it has nothing to do with me.  And that’s why I don’t think it’s a good fit.  Sure, I could be much more miserable.  Being in the military is the sort of job I would absolutely hate, find depressing, and feel 100% miserable in.  Thank God that’s not my life.  And yet my current job is one from which I often feel wholly detached.  My team at work was recently assigned a book to read.  The book is one of those self-help for the business-world type of books, all about how to be an effective manager.  When I encounter business jargon—revenue, return-on-investment, spreadsheets—I cannot explain how utterly dead those words are to me.  It’s not that I recoil at them.  It’s that I feel absolutely nothing toward them.  It’s the same emotional response you’d get from me if you had me read a book that was just a series of random numbers.  It is sterile.  Lifeless.  Non-existent, somehow.  I wish I could better put it into words, but I don’t know what else I can say.  If you created a Venn diagram where you put everything that seems real about me into a circle, and you put all of this business crap in another circle, there would be no overlap whatsoever.  But of course, my day job does revolve around the business world, so my life does overlap with it in some sense.  But not in a way that feels real.  It truly feels like the business world has absolutely nothing to do with me, and I don’t want really want it to.

Today, on Facebook, a friend of mine who is also a college professor posted that he had submitted final grades for the semester.  Once in a while something innocent like this reminds that another world exists, a world that I once knew and occupied.  There’s always something startling about it, this realization that a world better suited for me really exists and somehow persists without me.  Part of me wants to cry out in genuine bafflement, “What the hell?  How is this happening?”  It’s not because I think that world needs me.  It’s that it doesn’t make sense for me to be outside of it.  There is always a sharp pang of recognition in these moments, a quasi out-of-body experience wherein I catch a glimpse of a life I once occupied but am now wholly invisible to.  It’s weird and a bit unsettling.  Have you ever tried to break a really thick stick, one that requires you to strain with all of your might and teases you with several seconds of cracking noises before it finally snaps in two?  Has it ever required so much force that, once the stick does snap in half, a stinging sensation shoots through the overexerted muscles in your arms like a needle-thin bolt of lightning?  That’s how it feels whenever I encounter this other world, the one that I should inhabit, and see that it doesn’t exist only in my imagination.  It makes me homesick.  I long to be part of that world—a world that revolves around intellectualism and artistic endeavors.

I was recently told at work that, over the next several months, my job will be expanding in such a way that I can look forward to a nice pay raise.  One manager even told me I could end up making “lots” more money in the relatively near future.  I was glad to hear that; it means the company is invested in me and that I don’t need to worry about losing my job any time soon.  It also means that, if I stick with this company longer than I currently expect, I’ll at least have a better income.  But you may be surprised how little I care about the money.  That’s just not the type of carrot I need dangled before my eyes.  It won’t motivate me.  I don’t want to run this race.  I honestly think they could double my salary tomorrow, and it wouldn’t change anything about what I plan to do.  The more they pay me, the more at ease I’ll be if it takes me longer to abandon ship than I think.  But nothing’s going to stop me from climbing into that lifeboat and heading for a new shore.  Wish me luck.