'Better' isn't 'Good'

When I left CNET/Chowhound, I gave myself a couple months of yoga, meditation, and self-indulgent relaxation on a cozy porch in an idyllic village before taking out my trombone for the first time in many years and discovering that I couldn't make a sound on it.

I work like an ant, so I rolled up my sleeves and did my ant thing, playing long tones for a couple minutes every day, adding an extra minute per week. I drilled exercises. I started from scratch, rebuilding muscle structure and relearning fine points of control and endurance. When I could play for 15 minutes without bleeding, I started playing along with jazz records, slow at first, then building to medium up-tempo.

At a certain point, months in, I felt sufficiently recuperated to play in public, so I went to a local bar where a jazz trio played. I knew the guys, and had told them about my hotshot musician past, and they'd invited me to come play a tune when ready. And I felt ready.

Kindly, they called an easy medium-tempo blues. I began to play the melody, and a mere two notes in, I realized I had no business being there.

In one huge wallop, the realization landed that 1. my tone was thin and spindly, 2. my tuning was shaky, and 3. my tongue was spastically struggling to keep up with even the medium tempo. I played well enough to have convinced myself, in the shelter of my own home, that I could more or less play. But having spent 10,000 hours playing jazz in bars, I was calibrated like a Swiss timepiece, precisely gauging my lack of even minimal competence.

I could sense musicians' eyes rolling behind me, and could relate much more to their position than to my own. I wanted to be the groaning professional. That's *my* job!

It was sickening. Not in the cartoonishly tearful sense of "I'm not good enough!" or, the long sad story of abandoning my musical career to run a web site. It was sickening in the here-and-now, not in the propositional self-story-telling. I was like a cat stuck up a tree. I'd managed to get up, but had no idea how to get down. Ascents feel valiant, but, seeing where you've actually landed, you instantly see what a fool you've been.

"Better" isn't "good". It's sickening to discover how easily you can mistake the two.

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My dad suffered from major depression for years, but managed to move across the country and find a like-minded colony of Republican hippy artists to create with. He had a diner breakfast table full of buddies to linger with over coffee in dry desert air, and he was productive with his sculpting.

Better! Though one day I returned from a shopping trip to his new house and discovered him sitting alone in the dark staring glassily at the wall. "It's such a relief to have overcome the depression," he cheerily announced at breakfast the next day for his approving chums. And he meant it.

"Better" isn't "good".

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I have healed a long line of maladies over the past two years, many of them supposedly irreparable (fwiw here are some self-healing tricks). I haven't even considered whether I feel "good" or "bad" in a very long time, with my eye on the ball of fixing this or that, honing methods, adhering to med schedules, and warily watching for reoccurrences of grave problems in stomach, heart, pericardium, intestine, ankle, foot, and shoulder which would require a swift trip to the ER. It's been my full-time job, and I don't bemoan it. I am an ant.

But the other day, walking easily across town, I felt an uncommon sensation: a glow of good health. This, finally, might be time to reschedule my long-delayed trip to Taipei. I haven't had a speck of Chinese food in years! It seems absolutely feasible. I feel BETTER!

"I'm not going anywhere," I declared to a friend. This time I'm wiser. This time I won't get stuck in a tree.

But nah. Taipei, here I come. Because comfort zones are for pushing, and complacency, in the long run, is more perilous than peril. Cats that remain sensibly on level ground are less than full cats.