New Beginnings

I begin this blog as I begin a new life.

In a few days I will turn 40. For the last decade my birthdays have come and gone, eliciting little reflection from me. 40 feels different. For the first time I am struck by the possibility, even the probability, that I may have more road behind me than I have ahead.

Since childhood my identity has revolved around the cello. It may seem strange from the outside, but musicians often make firm commitments to demanding and specialized life paths as children. For me, my commitment remained essentially unchanged for almost three decades, even through the most significant life events. Then, eight weeks ago, I resigned from my faculty job at a leading music education non-profit and chose to let my old life slip into history. To my students and colleagues my departure came out of nowhere, prompting speculation about whether I’d suffered a health or family crisis, or some other personal catastrophe. Thankfully not. But the truth did require a personal journey through darkness.

Seventeen months ago my wife and I arrived home from Korea with our son, the culmination of an emotional, year-long adoption process. Nothing could have prepared me for the far-reaching consequences of becoming “dad” to this rambunctious four year old.

As we anticipated his arrival, I was excited that my life would gain a new dimension and added depth, but I imagined that my cello life would remain essentially unchanged. Instead, over the next fourteen months, I came to question even my most basic assumptions.

It began with a growing sense of dysregulation, maturing to dread as my practice discipline eroded and my practice time dwindled. I felt myself growing weaker. I often felt angry. My patience frayed easily and I lost my temper. Resentment gnawed at me. My life had been ruined, I thought. My wife was to blame. My son was to blame. The dark and easy path of voluntary victimhood laid itself out before me.

In my search for answers I began to probe my deepest assumptions. I began to pay attention to my resentment. It showed up with such force as to seem utterly justified. But was it? Or did it perhaps point to questionable underlying assumptions? Gradually I realized that I had been living out an unarticulated first principle: cello always comes first. Years of conditioning had wired this principle into my brain and my body at the level of existential necessity. My son’s arrival brought that into stark relief. Starved of practice time, I would wake up frenzied at 2 a.m., gripped by a panic that could only be assuaged by practicing. It took months to admit that I faced a life altering choice: I could choose the cello and risk doing grave psychological harm to myself and those closest to me, or I could surrender a lifetime of conditioning, commit to a new guiding principle, and put my family first.

Anger turned to grief. I mourned for the cello-centered self I had fought so hard and so long to forge and sustain. It hadn’t come easily for me. It had required an abnormal force of will and a capacity to endure profound psychological pain to secure the perceived prize. This was who I was, and who I had been for almost as long as I could remember. To the extent that I had succeeded, I always reveled in the sensation of surmounting the seemingly insurmountable. The highs from my cello journey will undoubtedly remain peak experiences of my life, and, for better or worse, I will always owe credit for who I am to my thirty-year dance with the cello.

To my surprise, grief gradually gave way to hope. Tremendous waves of hope. I began to see the opportunity cost I had been paying. The cello had been preventing me from being present in the everyday. I hadn’t been fully present in non-cello life since the endless summers I spent fishing as a kid in the south of Ireland. Virtually everything else I did was overlaid with resentment and guilt about the fact that I wasn’t practicing. I realized that the cello had left my other deep interests—a roaming intellectual curiosity and a profound love of the outdoors—stunted and unfulfilled.

Darkness, confusion and inner turmoil slowly yielded to clarity and purpose. I resonated with the improbable privilege of life. I relished the promise of a more real, more embodied life. I didn’t want to miss another moment of reality—beautiful, flawed and fleeting—with my wife and my little boy. I wanted to be there to do what needed to be done. I wanted to nurture and expand my curiosity.

Now, in our fifteenth year of marriage, my wife and I are, for the first time, playing a truly interdependent game. We’re no longer compatible parallels; we’re a team on whom a little boy depends absolutely. My wife works a high octane job to provide financially, and to make her burden bearable, I take responsibility for everything else: school drop-offs and pick-ups, meal plans and preparation, bath time, bedtime, grocery shopping, laundry, finances, cleaning, home projects, yard work, and the management of our rental property. And, in the center of it all, is a little boy who has been through more than any child should ever face, and who deserves the best we have to give. I intend to be there.