It's In The Doing...Sort Of

I’m learning the jazz standard “All Of Me” for the piano. Which is kinda hard with fingers built like Fred Flintstone’s toes.

The process is clunky and often maddening. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the splurky notes are my missing the keys or pounding the keyboard like a toddler.

And what I’m learning about me in this grind is the kind of stuff I write about. Sort of.

Rather … intend … to write of these things. Does that count?

I wrestle with my credentials. I haven’t built a seven-figure business. I labored fourteen years building a video production company. Building is a loose description. I succeeded and failed for fourteen years. I struggled and learned, wondered, and sometimes sat up in the dark quiet, questioning my life choices.

There are the high-credibility builders and shakers. People listen to the CEO, seven-figure builder because they’ve done shit. The inter webs applaud because they’ve done what they’re talking about. So they’re given credibility built upon experience.

While I’m over here chronicling my struggle with playing a finger twisting EbMaj13b9 chord and not sounding like a cat falling on the piano.

I cringe to admit my accumulated college credits have earned me nothing. I have both expansive and expensive academic experience. And books. Lots of books.

And here I am, learning JAZZ PIANO. What the hell got into my head to take up playing jazz piano at 61 years old? And write about it? Or anything else?

I’m not running on confidence. It’s audacity. An audacity driven by necessity. I need to tame the churning buckets of chaos in my head.

I am a thinker. Always have been. I think and ponder, question and wrestle with my thoughts. I research, and learn, and add to the noise of pouring tubs of lego blocks into the bathtub of my mind. Those suckers sting.

My curiosity runs on eleventy seven. It’s a niggling itch behind my eye that burns until I seek and find answers. If curiosity was an addiction, I’d be a founding member of DCA: Dead Cats Anonymous.

But does that qualify me to write? Sort of.

I’ve lived my life. And, to state the obvious, I’m still living my life. Building something. I have a vision of…something. I’m over here making decisions and choices with partial information. I’m doing what needs doing without any promise or security that it will lead to anything other than a discordant noise in the wind.

But I’m doing…stuff. Scary, uncertain stuff. Because I need to. I need to deal with the noise in my head. I need to express the ideas. The cold, hard fears, like “Is this another wasted semester of my life?”

But sitting with my unexpressed thoughts is its own kind of chaos. And it doesn’t resolve on its own. You could argue that this is just public journaling, therapy with an audience. Maybe. But the taming of the chaos is real. For me. And some of what scurries and trundles through my noggin is worth handing off. Sort of. That’s for you to decide.

Why should anyone listen to me if I don’t know what I’m doing? I’m certainly not a guru or an expert. Of course the experts teach us things we don’t know. But it’s more than that. We listen because their results are proof of concept. It’s in their doing.

And we think, “If they can do it, then maybe I can do it.” And if I can learn Jazz piano at 61, then you have a shot at that thing that’s been waiting for you to breathe life into it.

I write for the same reasons I sit at the piano every day. Because I’m learning. In spite of my failures and shortcomings. I’m applying myself, slowly, imperfectly. Because the doing is what matters. The hands on, ‘I’m going to beat the crap out of this problem until it capitulates or dies,’ doing.

I know I don’t look like I know what I’m doing because I don’t. To look at me is to see me twisting about, trying desperately to bring it under submission. I’m likely sweating, grimacing, looking a bit spent.

But the doing scratches that itch. And adds to the story of me, one moment at a time. One bruise at a time. It orders my life and helps me make sense of it, little bits at a time.

Because at my age, I refuse to sit in silence and let the chaos win. I’d rather embrace the suck and wrestle with it. So I can be the person who doesn’t wait for permission to share what I know and think.

The doing is the only credential available to me. And the only one that was ever going to mean anything anyway.

So let me ask you: What’s that thing itching the back of your eye? Throwing a tantrum in your head, screaming “C’MON!” What has been thrashing about, waiting for you to finish getting ready to get ready?

You’re not ready. And that’s okay. Neither is anyone else. Doing is what gives you clarity.

It’s in the doing.

Make it happen. Serve it up. Maybe the table will go quiet as people savor the dish you worked and sweated over. The silence at the supper table enjoying good fixin’s.

The credential isn’t in the title, the degree, or the revenue. It’s in your audacity to show up and do what needs doing, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing. Especially then.

Tadaa!