Doors

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us."

-Helen Keller

When perusing the blogroll that google suggests, I rarely find anything of serious interest. Angry people writing about angry things, a few opera singers who, like myself, share the same issues of insecurity and travel and jet lag and ever-flexible relationships with those two little folds that live inside our throats. But a fellow singer who, not unlike myself, is facing some changes in his life that affect not only how you do your job but where you do your job and how you life your life. He's in the thick of it, but someone else had this Helen Keller quote on their blog, and he reposted it to his and, at the risk of starting some kind of weird meme, I've posted it to mine.

I had dinner with my voice teacher tonight. It's his last trip to Boston, his last week of teaching, and the last time I'll see him before I walk across the stage and an administrator places my DMA in my hot little hands. We talked about his students and their seeking me out to ask for grad school advice, career advice, audition advice. We talked about my search for a new teacher and the idea of technique as process, an idea that I didn't even know I had until I was articulating it to another singer. I suppose it's more of a philosophy about learning than anything else. We seek out new people and new perspectives because our learning is ever-changing, and we seek those new words so that an idea, which may have always been in our consciousness, can be new to us. Same with singing. We seek those new teachers, new coaches, so that they may speak the magic words to us that create new neural pathways and reactivate those two little folds in our throats so that they may perform that same task of vibrating in a new and hopefully easier way. Even having this conversation with him was weird. I'm no longer the naive 24 year-old, fresh from Mississippi, with no experience on a stage bigger than a municipal auditorium and more time in an orchestra pit than on the other side of the footlights. But I'm not ready to assume the other role of the real teacher, the mentor who guides those young singers down the scary and treacherous path that hopefully leads to happiness. Notice I didn't say, "success."

I'm trying to be patient. I'm trying to keep my eyes open. I'm trying to keep those lamps trimmed and burning so that when the time draws nigh, I am ready to embrace whatever my future really is. I am treading water like mad and wishing I had a new language to learn, one with a really hard alphabet, or maybe some kind of complicated artistic craft, like glassblowing or furniture-building. Patience is a virture and I SUCK AT IT. But the door of studenthood is closing. Rapidly. And I'm watching it close. I pray for the good sense and awareness to look forward once it's shut.

To that singer-blogger-colleague, my heart goes out to you. It will get better.