I’ve been extraordinarily busy. I have been busying myself with being busy. It’s a terrible way to live. I’ve gotten into a wonderful habit of imagining a problem and then obsessing about the solution. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon, if you hate yourself passionately. Never do that. I’ve been overwhelmed by the things I alone have decided that I must do. Sometimes there is so much to be done that the completion of one single activity could never represent any measureable progress, so it’s hard to get started. Absolutely pathological. I must break the habit.

In that spirit, I’m proud to announce that I took my own advice for once and delegated. I’ve written previously about how web site design is a great way to procrastinate. It’s always a great way for me not to do what I’m more ideally suited to. However, I was growing tired of the previous look of my site and I wanted to change it. It started out very well. I had a few ideas. I had some breakthroughs in understanding and those ideas became achievable. In realizing those, I got a few more. It was very promising for a few days. Then, the days turned into weeks. Suddenly, I was working on a web site and not music, again. I needed to get out of it, but I’d invested so much time that the only way out was forward, not back. So I made a list of what I still needed done and headed to Elance.com. I posted a job and had four bids in about 20 minutes. I hired someone qualified and this headache was off my plate. Now I can just write, which is what I wanted to be doing in the first place. What a great thing! I highly recommend delegating. Could I have finished the site myself? Maybe. Should I have? Definitely not. I must learn to live this way all the time.

The sad irony of designing a great blog theme is that if your readers subscribe to your feed to get regular updates, chances are they’ll never see your theme. Wild.

This month I began obsessing about how I might stage the musical extravaganza that is my next album. After all, I have to gig on this stuff or there’s no point. I thought I had it figured out, but then I lost a key musician, already. I’m regrouping and trying to solve that problem. At least I’ve lined up a drummer on whom I can depend. He also sings backup, which makes him a damn unicorn where I come from.

In his book about excuses, Wayne Dyer had an answer to an excuse I could very easily warm my hands over. I can’t achieve my goal because I don’t have anyone to help me. To re-center, I often meditate on his affirmation. “The people you need to help you are already here, and are on their way.” That feels so much better to me than complaining about the pool of New York area musicians. Wayne’s right on, I think.

Being an independent musician means coping with countless unknowns, innumerable situations in which the outcome cannot be guaranteed. It’s a challenge for musicians like me, who are in control of most everything about their music, from conception to recording to management and so on. As soon as others are factored into the plan, things always get unpredictable. The key is to re-center constantly and resist the urge to control when control is impossible.

So, today I have a single task to accomplish. Love the music.

Recently, I had a very sick person in my household. It is a situation from which we have yet to emerge completely, though things are better than they were. This episode featured doctors who disagreed, medication that would not stay down and symptoms that fluctuated literally by the hour. This week, I learned that our fever reducer of choice has been recalled. Had I known that at this time last week, I’d have felt even worse, as if that were possible.

I rarely left the house except for trips to the doctor. I slept fitfully and in the back of my mind suspected that the strain would surely visit some of the same symptoms on me. This week, I’m left with a persistent and violent cough. While I did everything I could, I didn’t seem to be helping. There were times of utter frustration and overwhelming anxiety. I could not control the situation. I could scarcely influence it. There were times when any influence at all would have been a blessing. A loved one’s wellness isn’t something I ever want to bargain with and it never leaves room for compromise. Despite a checklist of far more severe trials that we had endured, I felt as if we were in serious trouble.

When under duress, I often retreat into relaxation and breathing exercises that are mildly akin to meditation. I’ve been using these techniques for about ten years, whenever I’m backed into a psycho-emotional corner. They came in handy last month as fevers rose and days passed without improvement. In most all of the adversity that I encounter, meditative techniques are quite satisfactory, as they enable me to look within, to find strength, peace, and sometimes, resolution. This is the first time since I can remember that I felt as if the techniques were not enough. It was then that I resorted to prayer.

I’ve long claimed that meditation and prayer were no different. Whether you called it the Universe, the higher power or God mattered very little. I maintained that we were all talking about the same thing. Interesting that when I was at my weakest, I suddenly called what I was doing “prayer” and from a cognitive standpoint was placing power outside of myself. Normally though meditation, I felt that I could draw whatever I desired to myself, but in this situation, I just could not seem to visualize a universal oneness. I was too weakened, too flustered. As I looked to God for an answer, change began to occur. Ice cracked. Fevers broke. Immune systems finally took hold.

I have a much deeper understanding of the connection between meditation and prayer now. Perhaps what I viewed as a weakness, an inability to overcome feelings of helpless isolation, was just the unconscious subverting of the ego that I required. In a way, there was an acceptance of a situation that was far outside of my abilities to control. Placing power in God’s hands was a sort of meditative shortcut to the sense of oneness that eluded me. Acceptance and peace can be goals of meditation. Instead of meditating simply to draw something to myself, by means of my own energy, I let go my problem to the universe with the profound message that I could only solve it with help. I surrendered to the flow. Help arrived because I declared that my energy alone was not enough. So, despite my internal semantic sleight of hand, I was projecting the same energy I always do, talking about the same thing, as it were. I had simply been lacking a key ingredient: cognizance of the truth that energy doesn’t just come from me. It is within and without, everyone’s to share in as needed, and there is an inexhaustible supply. In prayer, I called it God.

I thought of the idea of a higher power used by recovering addicts. I talked to an addictions specialist I know, who explained the reasoning to me. The recovering addict admits that left to his own devices, he will make a bad decision. To head off that event, he places the situation in the hands of his higher power. At first, I believed placing power outside of the self to be a weakness, but if you believe in the universal connection between all things, there truly is no way to place power outside of yourself. Placing something “in God’s hands” is only a semantic variation. This practice is acceptance while simultaneously availing yourself of the limitless energy that belongs to all of us. You’re not saying, “I can’t do this.” You’re saying, “I can do this, with help. I choose to open myself to the help I need, to the energy in all things, to God.”

If you send your message, what you desire comes to you. I’ve learned that in sending your message, you must also submit to the universe, energy, or God, within and without. In connection to what is freely given but never controllable, meditation will bear fruit. It must. It’s the law.

If your message is that you can’t do something, or that there is no hope, or that you are alone, these untruths may be “heard” as your desire. Regardless of whether we pray or meditate or whatever it is we do, we must choose to experience life as if we can do anything, that hope is real and that we are connected to all things and never alone.

That’s the way I want to live.

I played a gig the other night. It wasn’t my gig. It was with the other band I work with as a guitarist and keyboardist. The show was at one of the “better” clubs in North Jersey. It’s a big room and it has a nice sound system. We were the opening act for some group from Boston. Though we only had about an hour on the stage, maybe less, I took a few moments as I played to indulge in some introspection.

Music is a very peculiar calling. It puts up a fight most of them time. It’s not easy to play an instrument and sing. It’s even more difficult sometimes to put yourself out in front of other people. A performer experiences a constant emotional push and pull. On the surface, he appears to be an entertainer, attempting to make others happy, to give others some enjoyment. However, there’s very often another force at work, the overcoming of the judgment by those people you seek to entertain, should it be a negative one. So are you really playing for them or you? Does it matter what the audience thinks or not? This push and pull is just a subtext to yet another layer, which is the hope that at some point during the performance the music you’re creating will take on an energy, a significance, a force that transcends all of that ping pong of the ego. When that occurs, there is an event of pure forgetting when the music being produced is beyond the grasp of the mind or heart. Some believe it to be a manifestation of the divine in us. All of the control being exerted as the musicians make their sounds suddenly becomes effortless, beautiful and bigger than any human.  Most musicians live for that fleeting experience and their performing lives become an unending quest to lengthen it.

I believe that I felt it happen once on the last gig. Any insecurities I may have had in using someone else’s amplifier or not being pleased with the monitor mix floated away. I looked out into the room at all those people and in peace I proclaimed to myself that: a) I do not understand this experience. b) I have no feelings about my lack of understanding. c) I feel neither vulnerable nor defensive. d) This is what I was born to do. Not because I’m in this life to perform and make music, but because this is the way that I learn. It is through the eyes and experiences of a musician that the mysteries of my path begin to make sense to me.

This is why I do what I do.

Photo by Scott Higgins