Interactions in Real Time

I’ve been making some difficult choices recently, to give up on things I simply don’t have enough time or interest to do any more. What I gave up this week was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

Not because it didn’t make sense — it totally made sense. I hadn’t touched the bass guitar in over a year, except perhaps to dust it. It was time to let it go.

But this reaches more than twenty years back into my soul. I remember those years when it seemed that a life of music was the only possible path for me. Not just that I lived and breathed music — in my choice of friends, in my free time, and in my dreams — but because no other life path seemed likely or possible for me.

I still love music. But my creative interest lies now in writing code and writing fiction. It has been too many years since I found myself sprawled on the bed, running my fingers down the neck, teasing each note out until the walls shrunk in. Until demons in the air lifted me up to hear the glass and wood surrounding me reverberate in harmony with my angst.

No, music isn’t where my creative energy lies any more. It was good to pass those instruments to a new home, and focus on the characters who call me now.