I’m one to keep in mind that nothing is ever wasted, energy out generally comes back somehow, though it often looks different than I imagined. As I’ve been preparing and rehearsing for a show all month — activities that also come with their own logistical puzzles to work out — only to have it be rescheduled and then postponed again, I’m taking at least a smidgen of comfort in that belief.
“You can’t push the river,” I recall someone once telling me, which applies in all sorts of situations where patience or surrender is needed. In the grand scheme of things, especially given the political climate and the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza and all we’ve been through with the pandemic, a show postponement is small. And maybe it’s because of the climate outside of the blinders-on focus that working on a creative project requires, I felt that much more sunk. Often, not pushing the river means having some feelings.
That said, looking back, summing up, tracing a line from there to here, does seem to be a lot of what the unpushed river is bringing me. This weekend, I played a few songs as part of a local songwriter night put together by Mokai specifically to celebrate The Bazaar Cafe in San Francisco, which has been a gathering place for songwriters and other acoustic musicians for more than 25 years. The cafe’s history tracks very parallel with my own: from singing some of my first songs at its venerable open mic, playing numerous shows there over the years and name-checking it in a Bay Station song, the cafe has figured prominently in my musical life, if less so in recent years, for more than two decades. The same could be said for most of the lineup. It was heartening to see how many of us haven’t stopped in all those years, and sweet to appreciate how folks' work (and lives) had evolved and changed in that time, and also how we really hadn’t changed that much.
Mainly, I think, we’d just become better versions of ourselves, or perhaps, a better way to put it would be we'd become more realized versions of ourselves, which is by far the greatest benefit of pursuing the arts. Whether anyone else notices, all the ups and downs of trying to make something that represents your vision really help sand ones edges down.
I was reminded (again!) of this recently when I went through a bunch of old journals from the days when I carried a notebook with me everywhere. While I’ve moved most of my writing to the digital space in recent years, the books and papers and old journals have hung around, and I’ve been reluctant to let them go. Did I really need to keep them? I took a deep breath, removed a stack from a shelf and sat on the floor thumbing through the pages of old free writes, lyric ideas, lists and everyday journal entries, jotted-down directions and phone numbers, random sketches, ideas and anxiety-ridden processing. It was fun to review those notebooks, appreciate the seeds of ideas that eventually came to fruition, the worries that were in the end, often unfounded…and eventually, throw the half of them away.
Spring is here. Time for new things.