It's the journey...

As I work more and more in music and learn more and more, I realized this week that music is about the journey. How could it have taken me SO LONG to realize this? At this point, it seems so obvious. Maybe this is something I realized a while ago and just kind of forgot about. But it hit me over the weekend when I was talking to a friend that I was gigging with in Kentucky for a Catholic retreat for teens. I have often mentioned this idea regarding where I am in my faith journey. It’s a similar mentality for me with both disciplines. The closer I get to God and to understanding and living my faith, the more I realize I don’t know and more I want to work at getting better at it. With music, I was telling my students last week that I experience the same sort of thing with music. I’ve still working on new drum feels and rudiments that I’m not very good at, without feeling like there is some place that I’m trying to get to, specifically. “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.” All these years of practicing, rehearsing, studying, research, and learning in music, there is no other way of going about than to learn that we continue to work and explore and learn over the years and it seems to never end. But that’s also part of the joy of this journey is that there is so much to explore and to learn and to experiment with. The best we can do is just to try to enjoy it as much as possible as we go along and keep looking for opportunities to challenge ourselves further and enjoy the ride while also recognizing that it’s all part of the choice to live life this way.