A Reflection of Highschool and True Passion

Life is hard.

As human beings, we lead a tough existence. Living in a first world country, we have opportunities to dream and achieve at levels unimaginable to the majority of the world that is less fortunate than us. As arrogant and entitled as this may sound, privilege is quite the burden. Let’s face it: living in a first world country is hard. Even more so: being a high school student in today’s first world countries is hard. We [high school students] are under a blanket of ubiquitous pressure to be successful. Whether that pressure come in a direct form, like from family, or indirectly, like from society, it still affects each and every one of us. And what is success? That’s a pretty tough question to answer. I guess the first answer that pops into everyone’s head is that success arises from being happy. In his Second Treatise on Civil Government, John Locke says that we as humans are endowed by nature to the right to pursue life, liberty, and property. The oh-so creative Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence that humans of the then newly established United States of America have the natural right to pursue “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” So let’s stop for a second. Our great founding father Thomas Jefferson just equated “the pursuit of happiness” and “property.” So treating “property” as wealth/money, we see that good ole Tommy J. thinks that money is the key to happiness. And thus money is the key to success. Jefferson’s views are not unique as many people in first world (and all worlds) society believe that money is the equivalent of success. I happen to disagree with such a mindset. It seems, to me, that, as cheesy as this might sound, that money and material objects are a cover up for a devoid of true happiness. Sure, a car with the finest leather seats and lots of horsepower can make you happy. In fact, I couldn’t think of anyone that it wouldn’t make happy. But it wouldn’t make you truly happy (that is unless you have a true love and passion for automobiles).

Recently, I have come to a great realization; there is something beyond money that makes everyone truly happy, and therefore, truly successful. I love music. I love music more than anything. Listening to a truly moving piece of music can make me cry, and it does most of the time (though I have to contain it in school or I’d imagine being made fun of quite a bit for it). Even playing music is unbelievable joy-giving. The sense of accomplishment and reward one feels from making his own interpretation of great art is an indescribable feeling. After spending six weeks at the high school division of the Tanglewood Music Festival (huge music festival run by the Boston Symphony for you non-musical enthusiasts), this love was one-hundred-and-fifty-percent confirmed. More than that, what was great is that for the first time in my life, I truly felt like I fit in with a group of people. And that I was truly inspired to work fervently. I felt driven.

Before I went to Tanglewood, to be entirely truthful, I had the mindset of the typical high achieving first world high school student. The goal was to crank out a weighted GPA higher than Waka Flocka Flame with as many 5s in AP exams as there are emails that Hillary Clinton deleted. And the goal was to find something that’s kinda cool to show colleges I’m unique and that I deserve a spot in their class of 2020 so that I could become a consultant or whatever, make a decent amount of money, and maybe support a small family so that I could have kids to continue the cycle of normal-high-achievement. It was a vision of success, but an empty one. I knew that I had loved music, but I saw it for what it was at the time: something that I could use to get into college. Tanglewood made me truly acknowledge my passion; it made me realize that life is beautiful through sound, that hard work is a beautiful and rewarding thing, and that for me to be truly successful, I had to somehow incorporate music into my professional life.

Not gonna lie, by the end of my junior year, I was pretty burnt out. I had just finished up 7 AP classes and exams, an SAT, a boatload of musical work (as compared to the average high-achieving first world teenager), and had finished a solid year of tutoring disadvantaged children in mathematics (which was very rewarding and fun). But after that last semester exam for school in June, I was done. I didn’t wanna do anything with anything that didn’t involve me sitting in a chair listening to classical music or watching TV. I didn’t wanna practice especially (only doing an hour and half of marimba a day from the last day of school to when I left for Tanglewood two weeks later as compared to doing much much more usually) or even think about anything scholastic. I was apathetic. To say I was burnt out would be the understatement of the century. I knew that the apathy was retarding my progression as a musician, but to be honest, I was so apathetic at that point that I didn’t even care.

The second I got to Tanglewood, that apathy went away as quickly as Herman Cain’s presidential hopes back in 2007. As I said earlier, I was inspired, empowered, motivated beyond belief by the music and people around me. Ever since I went to Tanglewood, I’ve been working my butt off to become a better musician; I’ve loved every second of it and couldn’t see doing anything else to be honest. I realized something: my apathy towards music was gone. Then I realized something else: my apathy towards school was even worse than at the end of my junior year. After hours and hours spent perfecting the technical and musical intricacies of my instrument, studying music, and studying scores, the absolute last thing I wanted to do was 300+ flashcards for AP Biology or a poetry analysis for AP Literature. I’m not gonna lie here again, I have absolutely zero interest in English Literature. It is, to me, an incredibly unappealing art form and boring academic subject. While this might sound ignorant and is likely to change, it’s my opinion at this very moment and has been since I started school. I knew, from my commitment to school, though, that I needed to continue my good academic standing. I knew I needed a way to get rid of my apathy towards school. So what did I do? I practiced marimba for a few hours. What else would I do in my free time? More so, I did about 70 minutes of the most boring, unintellectual, monotonous, yet absolutely essential part of learning any instrument: slow technical practice. After doing that for so long after doing so much technical practice in the past few months from Tanglewood and everything, I was starting to acquire just a tiny bit of apathy again towards music. I was horribly upset. After truly confirming my passion and having a good two and a half month streak of passionate and productive work, I was again apathetic. Out of frustration, I started playing some of my repertoire. To be specific, it was the Guige from Bach’s Lute Suite in E Minor. Somewhere along the course of the three-minute piece, my apathy towards everything had vanished. That night I cranked out all of my flashcards for AP Bio, did everything for all my classes, and felt very happy. And just like that I had realized the key to my problems. Essentially, I had come closer in figuring out how to live the absolute best life possible.

At Tanglewood, one of the best friends I made there (who happens to be going to Juilliard) told me about his phone wallpaper. It’s a picture of a cheetah with the words “Work Harder” on it. There’s a long story behind it that I won’t elaborate on here, but it’s incredibly motivating. I’ve since used it as my wallpaper. Even more important than working harder, though, is working smarter. You can get more done in one hour of productive practice than five hours of half-assed practice. And maybe that’s the key to success? And life? Work harder? Partly, but not entirely. One must work very hard and smart to be successful. But how does one work very hard? Through motivation; the most motivation possible. And where does one get motivation. Through a variety of courses. For everyone, a true love of whatever one is working at. For me, that is undoubtedly music. Maybe it’s genetic, as a lot of people on my mother’s side of my family have musical backgrounds. What else? Maybe outside forces? I know seeing ten fellow Tanglewood percussionists that could wipe the floor with me on snare drum absolutely pushed me to put in the hours upon hours a day that I’ve been putting in towards snare drum. So is it just hard work? Not necessarily. A big element also arises from making sacrifices. From personal experience, hard work is called hard work for a reason.

If I loved marimba as much as I do, and I just played marimba all day, would it really be work? No; it’d be pleasure. Hours of gruesomely boring a tedious technical practice go into becoming the best marimba player possible; it contributes to playing the repertoire as fluently as possible. As a percussionist, I have to practice and be comfortable with snare drum, timpani, and marimba: three relatively different instruments. As I recently concluded, I have absolutely no enjoyment from playing snare drum. It just does not appeal to me even in the slightest. This does NOT mean that I do not have to work at it. Any percussionist that even wants to think of making a living has to be a killer snare drum player. And that motivates me to sacrifice some marimba practice time in order to put in the needed hours to the development of snare drum facility. It’s a rough sacrifice, but a sacrifice. The same could be said about doing monotonous school work like 300 AP Bio flashcards or prepping for the SAT. Everyone knows that the flashcards are pure busy work. Everyone knows the SAT is not a valid indicator of college readiness. In the world that we live in, to be successful, you need to put in some time to just get through the unpleasant stuff like SAT prep. Because that’s life. And it blows; but that’s life. So is that it? Just work super hard and sacrifice anything and everything to work as hard as possible? Almost.

Every once in a while, you gotta stop to smell the roses. Do things for the sake of pleasure. In short, do things that MAKE YOU HAPPPY. Do things that remind you the hard work is paying off. For me, after doing hours of rough marimba practice, taking a second to play some repertoire is incredibly euphoric. It took away my apathy one-hundred percent away with everything. And that’s really what allows you to work hard: when you have absolutely no apathy towards anything. Nothing is enjoyable when you’re apathetic. Apathy, burnout: whatever you wanna call it, it is the devil trying to make you as terrible of a person as possible. And you must overcome it. There is no other option. So to summarize three pages of my 3-hours-of-sleep-mind rambling about life, to be successful, you need to do something incredibly well that you absolutely love. To do that, you must work incredibly hard at it and work in the things that are as unpleasant as possible for long periods of time. To do that, you gotta do things for pleasure every once in while. You gotta do thing that are unproductive for short periods of time to remind you that life is worth living and that the hard work is for something. That short-term unproductiveness will take away any form of apathy you might have and in the long run make you incredibly productive. And who could ask for more? To be honest, all of these things are much easier said than done. I’m not exactly sure what I’m gonna do after I finish writing this, but I know I’ll have no apathy at all towards it. And that’s a beautiful thing.