Field Notes Vol. 6 no 3: Coming up for air...and remembering our purpose

When I last posted an edition of “Field Notes,” I was wrapping up my final semester as Director of the Entrepreneurship Center for Music at CU-Boulder. Contrary to the belief of countless friends and colleagues who didn’t read their email carefully, I was not retiring altogether.

(I’ve had a lot of these conversations over the last few months: “Hey, Jeff! How’s retirement? You lucky dog…”  “Oh, I’m not retired.”  “Wait. What?”)

I have simply shifted my role to teaching only – a combination of the same entrepreneurship courses I’ve been teaching and private composition lessons. No more administration. No more death by 1,000 cuts. And also... no more calling the shots for the center I rebuilt from the dust and ran for 16 years.

It has been something of an odd transition for me emotionally, but my decision was without a doubt the right one. I still find myself thinking of something and saying to myself, Oh, I should get on that. Or coming across an article or website and thinking, I need to share that on our Canvas page; Discovering an interesting person: I need to invite that person to come give a talk; Meeting someone new: I need to take them to lunch and see if they’re interested in getting involved. Not to mention the truly mundane: Let me check on the availability of that room; What do you mean somebody ripped down our posters??; Did you remember to order the pizza? And don’t forget: if you tip them more than 20% the wrath of the financial office will crash down on your head.

The whole day, every day, weighted down with minutae until there’s precious little room left for anything else.

The necessary crowding out the important. Stephen Covey would not be pleased.

I suppose you could say I was burned out. And like all burnout, you don’t realize you are when you’re in the middle of it. The weight of everything grows so slowly that it becomes normalized. Only when you’re able to step outside of the situation do you realize you’d been carrying around a giant sack of rocks.

Once again I am reminded of the message that swept over me at MacDowell (two years ago now, which hardly seems possible):

Life is too short to spend it doing anything other than those things that you’re best at

and that bring you the most joy.

And so I am loving my new role at the university more than I ever expected I would. Not just because I’m no longer spending so much of my energy on the day-to-day of running a program (which I was competent at but had stopped bringing me joy long ago), nor just because the energy that’s been freed up as a result can now be directed elsewhere. It’s both those things, to be sure, but there’s also that strange feeling when a stress that’s been with you for as long as you can remember is suddenly alleviated; something rushes in to fill the vacuum. And in my case, what rushed in was joy.

I wasn’t sure if I’d be any good at teaching composition, but it turns out I am. It also turns out that it brings me more satisfaction than any teaching I’ve done before. And in the classroom, it turns out that “Jeff Just-the-Professor” is a much more effective teacher than “Jeff the Face and Voice of the Entrepreneurship Center” ever was or ever could be. I no longer feel like I must always be the entrepreneurship Pied Piper, framing my every utterance as a subtle piece of evangelism…of, if I’m honest with myself, an act of self-justification that was not necessary (not entirely, anyway).

Now, I am playing no other role than being my full and authentic self. And the resulting infusion of energy and inspiration has been nothing short of transformational.

That’s the “coming up for air” part of this entry.

And remembering our purpose? Well, in rediscovering mine I find myself better able to articulate the importance of purpose to others — and to our society as a whole. One of the things I talk about a lot in my entrepreneurship course is how we can articulate the value of the arts. And I don’t mean monetary value; I mean: Why should anybody care about the arts? And why should anyone care about the particular art a group or individual creates? It’s the most important question for artists and arts organizations to ask themselves, yet it’s also the one most often skipped over. Why? Because it’s a hard question to answer!

Articulating the value of the arts is hard because the benefits it delivers are extremely diverse, they can vary from person to person or community to community, and they are often abstract and therefore hard to articulate. For us in the arts, we understand our value on an intuitive level, but ask someone to put into words what we know to be true and suddenly we’re at a loss. All the more reason, of course, why we mustn’t skip the question: if we can’t articulate the value of what we do to ourselves, then how can we expect to communicate it to anyone else?

There are many ways to express the value of the arts, and I’ve come across two more recently. First, a story:

Last weekend my husband and I went to a show at the Dairy Arts Center, Boulder’s community arts complex. (It’s inside what was once an actual dairy processing building.) The Dairy has two conventional theaters, a black box, a small film venue, gallery space, a ballet school, and houses the offices of dozens of local arts non-profits. It’s always a busy place, but last weekend it was buzzing in a way I’d never seen before: every space had an event or show, all of them sold out. The lobby was packed when we arrived, and this thought occurred to me: This is part of how we resist.

I’ve been thinking a lot these past months on what it means to be an artist in these times of strife. (I know many of you have been, too!) Why have the arts been so important historically at times like this, and how can we harness that today? As I wandered through the lobby of the Dairy the other week, I knew intuitively that this gathering was a sort of resistance to the oppressive and authoritarian currents surging through our country. That it was an act of defiance. That there was power in what was happening there. But I couldn’t articulate exactly how.

The following Monday I was talking with the students in my Graduate Career Seminar about this, and I asked them two questions:

1. Do you agree or disagree with the notion that a packed community arts center is an act of resistance, of defiance? (Yes, they agreed.)

2. Okay, now here’s the real question: WHY?

   
   

This question did not result in an immediate answer. Eventually, they said: art has often been a channel for expressing ideas that are contrary to the status quo or the power structures of a society.

Yes, that’s true. What else?

The arts bring people together, and the only way to resist the powerful is with numbers.

Also true. And what else?

Then they fell quiet. I let the silence sit there for several minutes —  I wasn't sure myself what the answer was, but I knew there was something more we hadn't gotten down to yet. And then I said: What do you think about this: What if we looked at how the arts differ from the content — either policies or communications — that comes out of our current leadership or, for that matter, any historical regime committed to authoritarianism and oppressing anyone and anything that resists it? There’s a reason, after all, that authoritarians have always seen the arts as a threat. Why is that?

More thought; more searching for words. Eventually we agreed on this:

Oppression glorifies the worst in the human spirit.

The arts glorify the best in the human spirit.

That’s why that night at the Dairy felt so important: the community had turned out in force to lift up the human spirit in defiance of all attempts to quash it. Realizing this was one of those wonderful moments in the classroom where there’s a collective lighting of the lightbulb — for students and professor alike!

This leads me to my closing thought, that second way to express value I mentioned before. I was reading the latest newsletter from my Dean at the CU College of Music, John Davis, and he talked about “turning adversity into activism.” And I thought that was a great turn of phrase. We often hear things along the lines of turning adversity into opportunity, but this felt different; it speaks more directly to our present situation. It also reminds us of the power of the arts to inspire and drive activism — whether that be with regard to climate change, economic justice, preserving democracy, or any other issue challenging us. There’s plenty of adversity raining down on us these days, and it seems to me that the only way to survive that, and to go from endurance to successful actions of resistance, is by stimulating the best in us. History has shown us this time and again: only the best in us can defeat the worst in us. And is there any better empowerment of the best in us than the arts?

These are challenging times, and we have critical work to do. The good news is we have the incredible power of the arts on our side.