Groundhog Day

The 2nd of February is still almost a week away, but then that's not why I used Groundhog Day in the title of this blog entry.

Instead, it's becase of an interesting conversation I had with my friend Greg last night, who called to catch up with me, see how the whole Belgian adventure was unfolding, and check availability of a guest room at Chez Rose-Zad0w. In the course of the conversation, Greg likened my pursuit of an artistic lifestyle as living the life of a groundhog.

Seriously.

The gist of his metaphor was that the moments when an artist's work is visible to others (individual performances, art exhibitions, publishing a book, singing auditions etc.) are like those brief moments when a groundhog pokes his head up out of the burrow and looks around in the sunlight, maybe eats something. That's all people see of him, and all that many imagine his life consists of. However, those visible moments are tiny fractions of his life. The rest of the time he's digging away furiously underground. Nobody sees this work, but it's going on all the time, and the funny thing is that the groundhog has only his own gut feeling to guide him. Is he digging in the right direction? Who knows? He just has to keep going...

Greg was lamenting the fact that so many people don't live an artistic (or "artisanal" as he put it) life, but instead get stuck on the "empirical" track. They take the brief moments of sunlight that they can see, and think that's all there is to a gopher's life; they don't realize that those moments are really incidental to a process that never really ends. What's more, simply following the process is itself rewarding, or can be if one decides to let it. In other words, if you're going to spend the rest of your life digging, you might as well start getting excited about dirt.


Greg views life as continuous development and exploration for the long term; people stuck in an empirical rut are following an aquisitive, materialistic, I-want-it-now path. Another way of saying it would be to say that some people are focussed on a comfortable life, while others want a meaningful life. Empirical people will always want the new model of car, the next big-screen tv, the newest computer, because they only see the things in front of them, and not what they mean. If you want to live a life that means something, you have to give up some of those empirical things.

Heavy thoughts for a Monday morning, I should apologize to those of you just waking up. You might want to get another cup of coffee and read through this blog again. One last extension of the metaphor, though: I have lots of people telling me that I'm digging in the right direction, and in that I'm very, very fortunate. Greg, my painter friend Darren, Bruce my teacher, his teacher Pierre Fleta, my musician and writer friend David, my colleague and pianist Dina, and many others. Even the auditions I've sung result in people telling me that I'm following the right path (or digging the right tunnel, I guess).


Happy digging!