I tripped over the perfect book as a companion to my return to the trombone after so many years. The book is called "Common Sense for Comeback Chops". I found it totally by accident when I looked up my Jr High trombone instructor. He wrote a book that I bought just for the nostalgia of it. This book was on the same website, so I bought it too. It's fun to find a good read. But to find one apparently written just for me, totally by accident is awesome!
I've read exactly one page of it. Already I have enough to occupy my small mind for several days. In discussing the hunger to return to playing after an extended absence, especially a number of years, the author discusses the intrinsic expression of music as something completely different from hearing, thinking about or even being moved by it.
We hear music all the time. We listen to it on purpose now and then. We think about sometimes - maybe a certain piece's place in history, the message it presents, the beauty of it or something. We are moved by it often. Music invokes a reaction as an association with events or circumstances that have meaning for us. For example, hearing our college fight song takes us right back to the stadium in the middle of a good game. The song we share with a significant other rekindles a whole lot of emotion sometimes good feelings and sometimes regret.
But creating music, at the time and place of one's own choosing, and shaping it and forming it with one's own lips is a completely different way to experience music. Expressing oneself through it (as opposed to responding to someone else's expression) is intrinsically different. Even if I've played a song before, I've never played it like I am now. Just as there are millions of apples and each apple is different and unique, so it is with playing music.
The author of the book expresses this concept better. But for me, it is exactly what I am so hungry for. I want to play - even if nobody ever hears it. I want to create, to imitate, to belong to the music I play, and know it intimately. I can almost (but not quite) get there with the guitar and piano. (It would be easier if I could play better.) But for me, I will again be able to do that with the trombone. I can't wait to get there.
And it occurs to me that the concept presented on the very first page of this book applies to a whole bunch of different paradigms. Playing basketball on a team is intrinsically different than watching it, studying it, cheering for a favorite team or player, or critiquing it.
Building a business is a completely different thing from taking business classes or working in a cubicle for someone else's business. Being a parent is a completely different experience than being around kids or studying early childhood development.
I can experience God through Christianity. I can know what the bible says, and can think about it, study it, try to figure out ways to apply it, etc. But intrinsically experiencing Christ, with the intimacy with which I play a song on the trombone, the passion for creating it, the hunger for belonging to it is something else I used to experience more of.
And I want that back too.