As much as I sometimes complain about the Monday evening drive—often through cold and snow— to our orchestra rehearsals all season, I do miss it when it pauses for the summer.
About a ten days prior to writing this we had our end-of-the-season concert, our final show, and (after a potluck dinner a few days later) wrapped the season.
In the cadence of my creative musical soul I should have gone to rehearsal last night.
There was no rehearsal.
Again, we’re on summer break.
When I was a kid creativity was an obligation. I would have rather parked in front of the television, or played video games or—honestly—just gone out and hung around with my friends. Being sent off to extra-curricular activities, even as few and scattered as those opportunities were for me, were disruptions to my life.
A few decades pass by and here I am pondering how to fill the vacant summer months when the air is quieter and my creative contemporaries are off doing other things.
I’ll get over it. I’ll find something to write or draw. I’ll find music to play on my own. I’ll prevail.
But it does all make me realize how much I’ve internalized the creative twists and turns of my soul into the person who I think I want to be in this part of my life. Missing—craving—that creative community when it pauses is like a symptom for which the cure is just to keep making more stuff.