To choose or not to choose?

We don't get to choose where we are born, who our parents are, what our station in life is (at least at the beginning), but we are told that we choose our career.

I'm not so sure, however, how much of a choice I have. I believe that being a musician was chosen for me. Not that I have overbearing parents who decided when I was born that I would be a doctor because they didn't have the opportunity. Goodness, what parent would chose for a child to be an artist of any sort? Thankfully, my parents did not get in the way at all, but something must have.

I have often thought about how much easier my life would be if I were content with being an administrative assistant, a limo driver, a sand and gravel salesman, a house cleaner... There are those, you know. Then I wouldn't have to sing my daily chorus, "I don't wanna go to work. I don't wanna go to work..." But that's just the thing-- even my whine is musical!

The several major fibromylgia flare-ups this past year or so have made me look at my career closely. Until this summer I didn't know what was causing me so much pain that I couldn't hold music, drive comfortably, sleep comfortably, play the piano, hold a pencil. It really put music as a career in jeopardy. I'm neither a good enough composer to work without the piano (much less a pencil), nor a good enough conductor to conduct by hardly moving. Learning the music to conduct still requires the use of a piano, anyway!

When I complained of hand pain in high school, the doctor suggested that I not play the piano, use the computer and sew. So I tired putting my needles away-- it didn't work. This past year when I considered putting music aside it didn't work either. I couldn't imagine my life without it. Not only that, though, music wouldn't release it's hold on me!

I didn't choose this profession; it chose me. It chose me when I was 4 years old dancing in the living room while my father played the piano. (Grieg was my favorite.) It chose me when I wrote my first song at age seven, "Mary will you marry me?" (whatever!) and conducted The Orchestra of my Stereo playing The Pines of Rome. (When I was little I thought there was a tiny orchestra in the radio, and I always marveled at how they knew when to start!)

Thankfully, now I know "from whence cometh" my pain, and how to manage it-- at least to a degree. I no longer think of abandoning my life force- music. It is somewhat humiliating, though, to be 28 and unable to hold my own music in a choral concert-- much less have to sit for it. I wish I could abandon music and all creative drives, so I could be satisfied being an administrative assistant (the day job that pays the bills, and gets me and my musician husband health insurance). But in the exuberance after a performance well done, the bliss of a creative high, and even when it feels as though my body is falling apart all over, I am glad that music chooses to stay with me.