I’m not particularly good at singing but I love it. When I was 15, my parents moved our family to a new home on the other end of the city where I grew up. That meant going to a new school and having to make new friends.
In the new school, I decided to join the choir. I did that my last two years of high school. During my senior year, we did a Broadway Review. The practices were long, sometimes stretching late into the evening.
About a week before our debut, we were doing basically a technical rehearsal where we walked through the entire show, stopping to address any issues that lingered.
At around 8:30 pm (after we’d all been at the school for close to 14 hours), the director stopped the rehearsal which had devolved mostly into chaos anyway.
“Listen up! C’mon!! You’ve run the marathon. The finish line is only a hundred yards away, and now you’re going to lay down on the track and twitch?!”
That experience was nearly 30 years ago, but has guided me through many of the more difficult decisions and experiences I’ve had in my life. A handful of those decisions and experiences have been of the existential variety.
For some, addressing that question of who am I is a one off. Others will spend their lives contemplating that question. Perhaps, however, we spend even more of our time feeling like…
