Get Back In

“Stories of life are often more like rivers than books.”

—Norman McLean
”A River Runs Through It”

I think about time. A lot.

Maybe it’s the maturation of my children and the looming prospect of an empty next. Or maybe it’s the death of Matthew Perry, or the noticeable decline in my physical strength, or portraying 80-year-old Norman Thayer, Jr., in On Golden Pond. Maybe it’s just being in the middle of middle age and not being able to do a damn thing about it.

Whatever. Point is, I think a lot about how I am moving through time. More and more of late, I’m also thinking about how time moves me. On Saturday, you’re mourning the end of your kid’s time in marching band. Three days later, you’re making reservations for a trip to all-state choir and orchestra to watch the same kid trade a baritone sax for a bassoon, a marching uniform for concert blacks.

Time doesn’t give you long to mourn nor to celebrate. You can make room for those things, and they can sometimes feel like an eternity. But our experience of time doesn’t change its reality. Before you know it, time has moved you to a new place, with or without your permission.

Honestly, we humans don’t quite know what to do with that phenomenon. Every coach worth his salt will tell you that dwelling on a botched ground ball only leads to more errors, that the past is unchangeable and you’re better off putting a wall between yourself and it. Every therapist worth her salt will tell you that, if you don’t reach back to make peace with your past, it will rob you of your happiness here and now, that you can’t outrun trauma and will destroy yourself if you try.

The fact that both those postures represent true and wise advice illustrates the difficulty we’re in. The fact is none of us quite know what to do with failure, regardless of whether we were the cause of our own or the victim of someone else’s.

That’s why we rehearse. And also why we move on.

Both were in play at the all-state concert. Like their counterparts in the choir, the 150 or so kids in orchestra spent two and a half days in intensive rehearsal. They started and stopped, started again, were praised and corrected and cajoled by their conductor in an attempt to put together intricate pieces by the like of John Williams and Gustav Holst. A sloppy run by the cellos? Let’s try that again. Violas and trumpets out of sync? One more time, please. Bassoons playing with flat emotion? Well first, we celebrate that the bassoons were noticed at all. And then? Run it one more time, with feeling.

The South Dakota All-State Orchestra performs “Mars” from Holst’s The Planets.

When the concert arrives, though, there is no second chance. Time—rhythm moving through time—is merciless in its propulsion. By the time you realize you’ve made a mistake, it’s already over. The good musician will shake it off and get right back in. After all, as inspiring as it is to think about an ensemble as a collective, that idea only works if individuals are accountable to the project. You can’t dwell on your mistakes and serve the larger good. You have to allow time to move, and to move along with it.

Framed that way, a significant portion of our lives boils down to understanding the moment we are in. Many of our days are much like a rehearsal. We need to consider, to linger, to repeat, to perfect. We cannot move onto a different challenge until we either meet the one before us or come to terms with being defeated by it. And so we play, and we back up, and we play again, trying to make the sound right, or at least better than it was before.

Eventually, though, time calls on us to set rehearsal aside and perform the music it has placed on our stand. No more going back, no more trying again. We have to show up for ourselves and those with whom we harmonize. We have to constantly reach out for the next note, lest we fail to carry our part and risk tearing apart the entire piece.

Treating every moment like a rehearsal leaves us stuck. Treating each one like a performance makes us fake. A healthy person can move back and forth between the two.

Watching the orchestra from, as Denise put it, “the 45-yard line,” we saw plenty of mistakes—most of which may have embarrassed the individual musician, but few of which we could actually hear over the combined orchestra. But we never saw a kid give up or bow out. They’ve been trained well.

When the moment arrives, don’t dwell on your failures. Don’t call attention to your mistakes.

Just find your place. Forgive your failure. And get back in as though everyone is depending on you.

Because we are.