Passion Requires Slow Cultivation

Forget divine blasts of inspiration and fantasies of specialness. A slow slog toward mastery has unmatched gifts that you won't recognize until you commit.

Seashore (1969) by Helen Lundeberg

Many of the passions we pursue serve functions we don’t understand. We think that we’re seeking a new kind of life, a new kind of identity. We want to become a new kind of person — a better, more impressive, more fulfilled, more attractive human. But it’s often the side effects or even the mechanics of these pursuits that bring us the most satisfaction. We might fail to meet our goals — to transform before our own eyes into someone more special, more valuable, more lovable, more real — but we feel more satisfied in spite of these disappointments.

This is just one of many reasons why it’s so important to push aside your expired stories about who you are and why you do what you do (or fail to do much of value, in your own eyes), and notice how you actually feel. Because when you stumble on experiences that have come to feel, in these bewildering times, almost supernatural in their rarity — the enjoyment of hard physical labor, the soothing meditations of slow practice, the pleasure of being in the company of others — you might just notice that these experiences feel good. When you’re in the habit of noticing your feelings (and living in the present instead of reviewing your regrettable past or fixating on some fantastical future), you start to understand what brings you happiness in concrete, mundane, sneaky ways from minute to minute. And in spite of your inability to embody some fantastical ‘better’ version of yourself — the improved, ideal self that other people in the illusory world of social media appear to have achieved — you feel grounded and relaxed.

In other words, your stated goals in pursuing your passions might end up being a sideshow to the real satisfactions of process: immersing yourself in borderline absurd practices, habits, and behaviors that don’t achieve much, that look laughable or foolish to others, that appear as a burden or an unnecessary hassle on the calendar, but that bring you mysterious peace and calm and a sense that all is well in the world. What could be more rare in this world than that?

***

On Tuesday, I practiced my new song with my voice teacher. I’m taking voice lessons over Zoom, which is extremely weird and awkward. I disliked it for months, but it’s been over a year now and my voice has slowly improved.

It’s sometimes hard to tell that I’m improving, since my voice teacher isn’t one to overpraise. This makes sense, since he coaches young Broadway hopefuls at the highly celebrated musical theater program of a nearby college. He leads budding divas along the path to stardom every hour of the day, and then he takes a one-hour break on Tuesday mornings to get on Zoom and watch a middle-aged woman in bad yoga pants sing “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

You could say there’s something a little broken and pathetic unfolding in that hour of his day. You might even say that my voice teacher is almost like a ragged microphone plushie that this overgrown toddler of a middle-aged woman drags around with her, in order to imagine that she, too, is a budding diva on the path to stardom. And yet, like all of the best stuffed animals and lovies and woobies, he sits patiently and quietly and watches while she belts out

“I NEVER THOUGHT I’D COME TO THIS!”

And it’s true. I never thought I’d come to this, singing to a complete stranger over Zoom. What’s odd is that I enjoy it so much. I don’t mind that my view of myself on my computer screen is so horrific that I need to avert my eyes. I don’t mind that my gestures as I sing range from amateurish to flat-out tragic. I look like one of those 12-foot-tall, orange, air-tube people that flail their arms around outside used car dealerships.

It just feels so nice to sing, even in my bad yoga pants, in my empty dining room, where the acoustics are the best.

I have no dreams of Broadway. At this moment, I am low on dreams in general. So it can feel foolish to try to improve my voice, when I don’t have unrealistic fantasies or delusions of grandeur to guide me. Maybe I’m just being an idiot.

But on Tuesday, after we warmed up with some scales and then my voice teacher said, “Let’s get to some repertoire” (I mean can you imagine the ACTING, the absolute DRAMATIC CHOPS it must take to say the word REPERTOIRE with a straight face to a weird frizzy-haired stranger in her dining room?), I stood up and sang “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” And I hit most of the high notes in a belt I didn’t have a month ago. And my voice teacher said

“Wow!”

Which he never says.

***

So then he decided it was time to add some performance and acting notes to the piece. We didn’t have much time, so we went through the first four lines and I wrote down what I thought the emotion of that line was:

I don’t know how to love him (Vulnerable)

What do do, how to move him (Frustrated)

I’ve been changed, yes, really changed (Surprised)

In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself,

I seem like someone else. (Fearful)

Now if you ask me, that’s a lot of emotions to pack into one verse of a song, to the point where this very sweet tune could start to look like a cabaret act or something a street mime high on too many espressos might dream up before hitting the major tourist thoroughfares.

But when I sang the first line while thinking VULNERABLE!, my voice sounded clear and sad and better than usual. So of course I burst into tears.

If I were a Broadway hopeful, my voice teacher might’ve thought, “Hmmm, we really have our work cut out for us, to get this song ready in time for her big audition.” Instead, he had to watch me weep and sniffle for no reason at all. I mean, IMAGINE! Imagine the inherent, palpable, unavoidable ludicrousness of being an esteemed professor of the vocal arts on a ZOOM call with this strange flailing air-tube of a human and having to pantomime patience, for no good reason at all!

But if that were his vibe, I wouldn’t still be taking lessons. I’m not paying him to play make believe with me, no matter how strange these Zooms would look to a stranger who just walked in. If I wanted undue praise, he would’ve bailed a while ago. If he served up insincere praise, I would’ve bailed.

Instead, every two weeks, my voice teacher reminds me of an important truth: When you have a genuine passion for something, you can summon that passion in many different contexts. Tapping into that passion feels good. You care a lot, even when the stakes couldn’t be lower.

My voice teacher cares about vocal quality and he cares about solving the weird puzzles of the vocal instrument. But more than that, I think he cares about what severs a performance from the mundane world, those magical elements that cleave it from the humdrum and lift it up into some sublime realm where it can touch anyone. And because raw emotion is one of the elements that can make this happen, my cryface didn’t annoy him. It looked promising to him. He recognizes the possibilities at the heart of each new obstacle. When a student hits the wall, he’s energized by inventing new ways to scale it.

“This is going to be hard,” I said. “I already love this song so much. Adding acting is going to feel overwhelming.”

“Yeah, this is all new for you.”

New things are almost always scary, even when the stakes are low. Maybe low stakes make them even more frightening sometimes. Because MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING, YOU FOOL?

But our time was up. So he told me to write down emotions for the rest of the song and practice it with those emotions. Then we said goodbye. And for a while after that, I sat there feeling

Vulnerable

Frustrated

Surprised

Fearful

Then I stood up and sang the song again. And no, I didn’t feel like a diva headed for Broadway, but I also didn’t feel like an air-tube outside a used car dealership. I didn’t feel like Mary Magdalene, singing about how many, many men she’s had before Jesus (yes queen yes) but I also didn’t feel like an over-caffeinated mime.

I felt like a regular person who cares so much about singing that she can care about it in almost any context. And when I sang

“I NEVER THOUGHT I’D COME TO THIS!”

I lifted off from the mundane world, into some sublime realm where vulnerability, frustration, and fear add up to something bigger, something transcendent. That’s what the song is about, after all: surrendering to a force that’s bigger than you, a force you can’t control with your old tricks.

***

I’ve been pretty flat for a few weeks now. I keep looking for inspiration but I can’t touch it, can’t feel it. I keep trying to use my old tricks in my writing and nothing works. And when I can’t write, I don’t want to do much else. So when I remembered that I had a voice lesson on Tuesday morning, I had an urge to skip it. What an expensive indulgence, and you’re behind on your deadlines. Why sing? What’s the point? And while I’m questioning everything: Why write another book? Why even read another book? What’s so good about books? There’s too much work, infinite work, and what does it add up to? You’ll never be that good, and no one cares, and all will be forgotten. Everything you do is erased and erased and erased as you go.

Inspiration is more rare than I often like to pretend it is. And right now, I’m not pumped up over some new goal, some new destination.

But even that disappointment is a kind of a gift, because it forces me to face this reality: Gaining mastery of a new skill is mostly drudgery. You sit down and do the hard work and you marvel at how bad you are, day after day. That’s the road, and there is no end point, there is just more road, endless road. Even though we talk about passion like it’s this heavenly blast of light and sound that drives you forward to greatness, real, genuine passion often feels more like some Cormac McCarthy novel where things go from bad to worse and you never arrive anywhere at all. But somehow (also like a Cormac McCarthy novel!) the bleak trees, the pavement, the bitter cold wind, all of these things are weighty, lustrous. You are almost dead of course, always almost dead, but somehow more alive than ever.

That’s where I want to live. Not in a daydream, not aimed at an illusion, not hoping to be saved or transformed, not trying to impress, not craving more and more and more. I don’t need a stage or an audience. I just want this dining room, the dogs pacing, the heater kicking on, the bare branches outside. To sing one line and stop to cry. To treasure this one small thing. To feel the press of this moment, everything weighty, everything lustrous. To take in this empty stretch of road: pointless, endless, doomed, and more alive than ever. 

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