Sacrifice. The challenge is real.
This past Saturday, I found myself staying up until 3:30am in the morning working on the Violetta Parra piece called “Gracias a la vida”. The challenge with this piece is that I don’t have any sheet music for it, so I'm having to learn it by watching the YouTube video at half speed then annotating it on paper by hand… It’s tedious, but it’s fun and I’m getting it. I’ve been doing stuff like this since high school, just never as complex.
But back to this 3:30am thing, it was one of those nights where time went by so quickly because I was enjoying the process and I was making good progress. But man, was the next morning hard! I think I’m still actually recovering from it 3 days later. I simply don’t recover as quickly as I used to. Not only is this a sacrifice on my health both mentally and physically, I find that it impacts my patience and overall mood at home. I’m not as happy, goofy with my kids or communicative with my wife! That’s the real sacrifice… As you can imagine, I’m having the heavy realization that it’s simply NOT worth it to make that kind of sacrifice. Being physically tired, and mentally exhausted personally is one thing, but when it negatively impacts those I love and the people I care about, it simply is not worth it.
I’m realizing that this needs to be a litmus test when choosing to commit time into the project. Sure, I have to make sacrifices in order to make time and prioritize so I can get enough practice in to be ready for the concert, but I think the real goal is to have life balance and being healthy so that I can still positively affect the people around me and not resent what I’m doing.
Sacrifice and minimize things like Netflix, junk food, time wasters, social media, useless phone time, etc., so that I can focus on the most important things in life. Living simply and clean I think will open up time in my life and my family’s life so that I can practice enough and not hurt them. De-cluttering life to make room for your passion should be the goal. How else can I look myself in the mirror every day?
-- Noel
