January 7, 2011

It is Friday, and tomorrow we are going back to teach at the conservatory after the Christmas break. I’m trying to figure out in my mind if we had two or three Saturdays off, but I’m too lazy to get up and look in the datebook.

Until last year I used to buy a yearly datebook from a company that would send it to me in the mail. I liked very much that particular datebook, and thought that it would be very difficult for me to switch to another one. About a year ago, when I wanted to order a new datebook, I found out that its price went up. Since during that time I was reviewing all my regular expenses in order to save, I decided not to order again the datebook and switch instead to a system of printing out weekly and monthly datebook pages from Outlook on the computer and paper-punching them into a folder. I thought that I would regret this cheep decision, and that every time I would use the new datebook I would be unhappy about not using the old beloved one. To my surprise, the complete opposite happened. The new system reveled itself to be much preferable to the old one. It allowed more writing space and also more flexibility, since you can add and remove pages easily as needed. But the real reason that I am telling all of this here and now is that this became a symbol and an example for me for how sometime we develop dependency on something and only after we give it up we understand how easy it is to live without it. This year I’m continuing my efforts to get rid of anything that is not needed. It is not easy, and I fully admit that because of my compulsive-obsessive tendency, I tend sometime to spend much valuable time on organizing instead of dedicating the time to create. The balance between the two things is problematic in my life, since I can spend days and months doing work that is related to music without getting to play at all. At the moment I don’t have a playing routine. On the other hand, I sit days and nights on the computer. There is always another email, always another press release to write, another webpage to design, another application for a grant, for studies, for work – it simply doesn’t end. Just now, for example, I sat before starting to write this and read emails. It took two hours, from 8:40 to 10:40 in the evening. I found another venue that it would be nice to try and perform in, called Loft in Köln, Germany.

All of this leads to the desire to get back to “One Time” and bring the book, which I started writing in 1989, to a point that it could be published (as it is really a diary, I deliberately refrain from saying “finished”). I admit that I am afraid to go back and read between its lines. Memory, even tough it is a gift of grace among the most beautiful and important in our lives, knows so well also how to pinch the heart. Again I will read the days of youth that have passed and will not return, experience my love in the magic of its youth days which have since matured. It is not easy. And still, there is no choice. I wish that the same way the new datebook brought joy to my life after I feared sadness, so would the renewed reading in “One Time”, in order to bring the book to its publication, would bring a new wind of happiness in my ripening life.