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I’ve had one of those weeks where I’ve been staring at the piano. I am trying to clock my 40 hours each week, but I had to coax myself away from a performance review. I can become a person that has to tick all the boxes and get everything perfect. But the songs I create from that place are just shit, so I came away from the piano (even though it’s beautiful & new), looking for a reset and picked up Eliot’s Four Quartets again.
I was reminded that my sitting down every day is another attempt, a new beginning. But it has to be more than just staring at the piano, praying to the muses for a rhyme. I must wrangle my past, dust off some shabby words and begin the eternal task of saying the thing I’ll never really be able to say. Because every song, every hour clocked is “a different kind of failure” — it’s already been said. But, as Eliot says: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
Excerpt from “East Coker” by T. S. Eliot - read the whole poem here
“Wild Grape” by American artist ELLSWORTH KELLY (image)/ fascinating interview with him here where I felt echoes of Eliot and my thoughts on work & accomplishment
What do you think? How do you keep working when you like it’s all been done before? How do you reset?
