JUST A PAUSE ON THE WAY
Sometimes you need to pause on your way, to take a breath, in order to see where you are and where you are going. To sense where you would like to be and thus map out an action plan to be able to move forward and get there.
This is why it’s good to draw breath, to feel the breeze ruffling your hair, or a ray of sunlight shining on your face, to continue rousing your dreams and listening to the sounds of the universe, to understand your inner silence and check if you are on the right path. It’s good to be ready to meet new challenges.
It’s always healthy to pause along the way, which is not at all the same as giving up but rather the contrary; it’s about summoning up new energy by making the most of the positive and discarding what is no longer useful. Sometimes, “not doing” is more productive than running around in a whirl of compulsive activity. Taking time out means taking time to think, to consider things intelligently and spot the opportunities as come up in order to continue growing as an artist.
The singer must possess a certain degree of flexibility, an aptitude for self-reflection and self-criticism in order to recognize his or her weaknesses and work on them. This is an opportunity to see whether you have found the repertoire which best suits you, if your interpretation of each piece is truly convincing, if your style matches your personality, if you’re getting the best teaching, if you’re marketing yourself right, if your Web page reflects the image you want to project, and so on and so forth.
The list of questions and points on which to reflect is endless and I could go on, but each artist should draw up his or her own list.
This is why it’s worth pausing on your way, because it doesn’t mean postponing your objectives but rather making them happen sooner.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
THE JIGSAW PUZZLE
You can have as many lives as you care to reinvent.
As Steve Jobs says, there is no way to link up your story into the future, you can only join up the dots when you look into the past to see the path travelled and lived.
In my life I have written poetry, taught, sung professionally, composed music and then, one day, not entirely by chance, I became a singing coach. My experiences led me to a point where they prompted the need and desire to transmit all I had learned to other singers. It was only by experiencing everything I had learned and lived before that I could translate this into my true passion: training singers.
This was the moment when I felt that the dots in my life were beginning to join up.
My experiences as a teacher, added to those as singer and composer, have acquired a completely different relevance to their original value for me, and today I see that the parts of my life fit together progressively, naturally, laying the foundations for my existence and enriching it a little more every day.
So, now I return to teaching as I used to before. Something that makes me intensely happy; singing and also helping people who are singers, like I myself was once, people with dreams, hopes and the will to triumph. Teaching is the one thing that brings me greatest happiness.
Sometimes you don’t know why you have to take different paths in life and why you have to overcome certain obstacles. However, you just have to live through them, make the most of them and trust in the fact that each moment lived is part of an ongoing process in constant flux.
Everything starts to make sense when the pieces begin to fit together and make up the jigsaw puzzle and you find that there are no bits missing in your personal history, which is both unique and unrepeatable
You can have as many lives as you care to reinvent.
As Steve Jobs says, there is no way to link up your story into the future, you can only join up the dots when you look into the past to see the path travelled and lived.
In my life I have written poetry, taught, sung professionally, composed music and then, one day, not entirely by chance, I became a singing coach. My experiences led me to a point where they prompted the need and desire to transmit all I had learned to other singers. It was only by experiencing everything I had learned and lived before that I could translate this into my true passion: training singers.
This was the moment when I felt that the dots in my life were beginning to join up.
My experiences as a teacher, added to those as singer and composer, have acquired a completely different relevance to their original value for me, and today I see that the parts of my life fit together progressively, naturally, laying the foundations for my existence and enriching it a little more every day.
So, now I return to teaching as I used to before. Something that makes me intensely happy; singing and also helping people who are singers, like I myself was once, people with dreams, hopes and the will to triumph. Teaching is the one thing that brings me greatest happiness.
Sometimes you don’t know why you have to take different paths in life and why you have to overcome certain obstacles. However, you just have to live through them, make the most of them and trust in the fact that each moment lived is part of an ongoing process in constant flux.
Everything starts to make sense when the pieces begin to fit together and make up the jigsaw puzzle and you find that there are no bits missing in your personal history, which is both unique and unrepeatable
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