The Wilderness
As I sat down to begin writing for the blog this summer, I found my mind turning to the ritual of graduation and moving on to new stages of life, something that many of us in higher education just experienced in the past couple of months. It’s a time of rightful celebration, filled with proud families and friends, excitement for the road ahead, and reflection on the journey taken over the course of an education. Yet for all of its certainty in validating the accomplishments of students, commencements are also a preamble to what often is a very uncertain period in a young person’s life. That period just after graduation where we are trying to make our way in the world and transition out of being a full time student is one that is frequently challenging and stressful, leading to questions of why aren’t we better prepared for it when we leave school.
I, of course, think of my own graduation, or lack thereof, during this time. I finished my doctorate under the auspices of lockdown in May of 2020. My excitement for what I had accomplished and hopes for contributions I could make to the field were quickly sapped by a world wholly consumed by just finding a way to keep going. Performing and teaching music seemed downright impossible in those early days of the pandemic and that led to a lot of soul searching. What was I supposed to do with three degrees and nearly ten years of investment in musical study when seemingly no one was going to hire me to do what I had trained for? Having those questions during a period when I was supposed to be celebrating finally reaching the “end” of school frankly just sucked. I feel very lucky thought that through a gap year away from music and academia, an extremely supportive partner, and a healthy dose of therapy, I was able to get some clarity on how music intersected with my life both personally and professionally, which in turn led to the work I now do at NEC.
I’ve recounted my the story of this time in my life many times since in bits and pieces on this blog, to friends and colleagues, and especially when advising students who are getting ready to graduate. One particular time, when sharing my experience with a friend, they made a remark that I had been through “the wilderness” to find my current footing: a time of immense stress, hardship, and struggle, but also one of transformation and excitement. While the conditions of my particular experience were a bit extreme, I have recognized since then that every musician leaving college goes through their own “wilderness” at some point during their career, oftentimes right after school, but sometimes later on in their career. It’s typified by the hard questions:
How do I make a living and not compromise my artistic integrity?
How do I balance my professional life and personal needs/goals?
What do I need to learn to do that I was never trained for?
Those are just a few of the questions I and anyone else who has spent some time in the “wilderness” are familiar with. The same friend that named my experience the “wilderness” also described it as learning through suffering. We both agreed that a certain amount of this suffering was necessary, since those periods of heightened struggle and challenge are often when we learn and change the most. Yet, in the spirit of “What do I need to learn that I was never trained for?”, I’m inspired to think about the ways that those of us responsible for guiding new students out into the world might ease that sense of suffering just a little bit.
When my friend used the “wilderness” to describe my experience, my brain instantly went to Brené Brown’s work and how her concept of the “wilderness” is an accurate description of the place that I had been, where I am now, and where I still believe I am going. Brown describes the wilderness as follows:
“An untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. The wilderness can often feel unholy because we can’t control it, or what people think about our choice of whether to venture into that vastness or not. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.”
She sets a tall order with this language, acknowledging the danger and fear that comes with walking out into the wilderness, but also demonstrating that it is the most important place we can be. It seems like a bit of an exaggeration to define the first 5-10 years after a musician’s graduation as the wilderness, but I think it’s apropos because that is the time where we discover the artist that only we can be, synthesizing all we have learned and building the habits for the creative person we are to become. The personal nature of our quest during that time, when the safety net of school is pulled away and the demands of living a life in society make themselves more known, means that it feels like there is more at stake if we can’t figure it out. It is deeply introspective work full of challenging questions with no convenient answers. And yet it resonates outwards to our colleagues, students, and audiences showing up in the kinds of music we play, the artistic projects we undertake, who we collaborate with, and the types of audiences we play for.
Because navigating the wilderness after school is about finding belonging in our artistic practice, it’s not as simple as defining the 4-5 classes missing from the higher education curriculum. There are, of course, skills like financial management, entrepreneurship, community engagement, public speaking, and more that commonly get put on the list of things alumni of music schools feel they missed in their education. Instead, I’m going to be spending subsequent posts framing the experience from “habits of mind” that we can cultivate throughout musical study to help future music graduates better navigate the wilderness. These habits of mind constitute a practice we build as unique as our approach to our instrument, that helps us define success and artistry on our own terms. Fundamentally, that’s the most important lesson we learn in the wilderness, we all have to find our own way out in the wild, but when we do, we can find strength in vulnerability, belonging in solitude, and clarity of purpose in an ever-changing and uncertain world.
