Tag Archives: isolation

Tuesday Tuneup 119

Q. Where would you like to be?

A. In a place of greater freedom.

Q. Freedom from what?

A. From worry.

Q. What are you worried about?

A. People.

Q. What people?

A. All people.

Q. You worry about all people?

A. Didn’t I just say that?

Q. What is there to worry about?

A. Offending them.  Crossing them.  Hurting them.

Q. What makes you think you do these things?

A. I have a bumbling personality, and I frequently put my foot in my mouth.

Q. For example?

A. Talking with a lady, I asked her when she was expecting, and it turned out she wasn’t even pregnant.  I watched her go off and cry, and I felt horrible.

Q. Don’t you know that you’re never supposed to do that?

A. It slipped my mind, because I was pretty sure someone had told me she was expecting.  What they had actually told me was that she had three kids.

Q. When did this happen?

A. Oh, maybe a year or so ago.

Q. And you’re still dwelling on it?

A. Not really.  You just asked for an example, and that was the first thing that came to mind.

Q. Have you put your foot in your mouth at any time since then?

A. Yes. Many times.  Or, if I didn’t, I fear I did.

Q. When?

A. Yesterday.

Q. What did you say?

A. Lots of things. I was talking with a friend, and I wanted him to hold some things in confidence.

Q. And he did not?

A. He might not, because I fear he cannot.

Q. Why do you have that fear?

A. Well, he later called me and asked which portions of what I had asked him to hold in confidence could be revealed to a mutual colleague.

Q. Did you then remind him you had asked him to hold all of it in confidence?

A. No, because it crossed my mind at the moment that some of it would be okay to reveal to the third party, and some of it would not.

Q. And you don’t think he can tell where to draw the line?

A. No. He’s not that sophisticated.  He’s as bad as I am, if not worse.

Q. So what is the solution to all this?

A. I don’t know.  If I could make my mouth speak about half as much as it does, it would probably make things twice as good as they are now.

Q. Then why not do that?

A. I lack confidence. I’m an Introvert. Most Introverts, when they’re nervous, they clam up.  When I get nervous, I start foaming at the mouth.  I babble incessantly, and things come out of my mouth that really should not have entered into my brain in the first place.

Q. So you lack social savvy?

A. I think so, yes.

Q. Well what are you going to do about it?

A. I know what I’d like to do, if it were possible.

Q. What’s that?

A. I’d like to hole up in my nice warm apartment here, not to talk to anyone at all, and work on my project.

Q. What project?

A. Seems I have to readjust the opening and closing scenes of my musical, simplify the vocal score so that all the music can be taught in a single week, write out full guitar and bass parts, extract extraneous parts from the performance tracks, and–

Q. And what?

A. I’ve got too much work to do.  I can’t have all these people flying through my head all the time, worried about whom I offended by saying what, when and where.  I’m not a people person.  I’m an ideas & concepts person.  We all need people, but there are just too many of them for me to manage.  I just need a better balance.  I want to be free from the consequences of words spoken idly. I want to give the world my best–not my worst.  Really, I should never talk to another human being for the rest of my life.

Q. Isn’t that a bit extreme?

A. Of course it is.  I’m speaking from feeling, not from reason.

Q. Then why not start speaking from reason?

A. What do you mean?

The Questioner is silent. 

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Gratitude List 1569

(1) Just when I’d thought I’d run out of tooth paste and could not possibly squeeze any more out of the tube, I noticed a small courtesy pack of Colgate sitting inconspicuously on the counter of my sink.

(2) Although I haven’t been running much–and in fact have missed 13 consecutive days–the good news is that I’m still losing weight. This is partly because I’m still riding my bicycle a lot, and partly because I’m not eating nearly as much as I was there for a while.

(3) Grateful that the heat wave has died down, prompting me in part to issue this bit of a brief spoken statement when struggling to express a related thought. Grateful for pleasant weather and good vibes in general.

(4) Being as I’m currently engaged in the first-time process of syncing a written piano score to a previously played piano part — exact tempos and everything — I have found my ADHD to be challenged at new and unexpected levels. The good news is that I finally figured out a process that accommodates rather than aggravates the ADHD. Let me explain.

Suppose the process consists of 225 steps, each step containing 8 “sub-steps.” Don’t ask me how I did it, but I figured out a way for the 8th sub-step of each step to be identical to the 1st sub-step of the following step. This has the pleasant benefit of sidestepping the Deficit that would logically take place between the final sub-step of the previous step and the initial sub-step of the present step. As a result, a fragmented process has been transformed into a continuous process, wherein my ADHD is beneficial, not detrimental. I’m very grateful for this discovery — (and if anyone understood any of that, I’ll be even more grateful.)

(5) I seem to be coming out of a funk that seems directly related to the amount of time I have been spending alone in my apartment. I may not be actually getting more accomplished today, here at the local coffee house, than I’d have accomplished in the same period of time at home. But I somehow feel better about what I have accomplished. I am grateful for the ongoing sense that I am a functional part of a struggling humanity — and not just an outsider who does not belong.

“Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation.” — Albert Einstein

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Hermit

I believe that we who write lyrics and music tend to remember the music we write better than we remember the lyrics.   At least, that is true of me, and especially if the song was written long ago, and then more-or-less abandoned.

The song that is featured today is something I wrote in April of 1976 in an effort to come out of a long period of isolation and creative famine.  I remember it took me a month to write the song.   This was also the first month of my now 42 years as a long-distance runner.  Writing this song was part of a complete lifestyle change.

Since it took me so long to squeeze it all out of me, I remembered the music very clearly, and continued to remember it over the years, even though I hardly ever played it.  But I forgot a lot of the lyrics, which I never sang.

At some point in the 42 years since I wrote the song “Hermit,” I forgot all about it.  But this past week, the song for some reason resurfaced in my consciousness.  This time, it had been so long, I didn’t even remember some of the music.   But as the week progressed, I remembered more and more of it; and I practiced it several times on the piano.

As for the lyrics?  Here are the ones I remember:

Shifting back and forth
Between one reckless thought and the next,
Trapped inside a rented room
Behind a world that’s too complex.

And later:

Your life is just a rented room!

Still later:

We all need our time to think –
But how much?  That’s all I ask!
You could spend a lifetime claiming you’re close to the cure,
But when life itself is such a task,
You’re never sure . . .
Never sure . .  .

Interesting.  I was 23 at the time.  I wonder why the song came back to me this week?  I hadn’t thought about it in years.  Here’s what it sounds like.

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Anything Helps – God Bless!