Face the Music
by Alexander Romero
I find myself at a crossroads in life right now; content with the present, yearning for a bit of the past, but warily excited for the future. My feet are planted and content, but I find myself still drawn to the nostalgia of the past and wanting to move forward with life, by design. Rooted, but swayed in either direction depending on the days’ breeze.
After the final bell rang, declaring the end of another mundane school day, my friends and I would always gather in the orchestra room, enjoying each others’ company and discussing the days’ occurrences. I played viola for about seven years, beginning in sixth grade all through senior year of high school, so the orchestra room naturally became a second home for me. I wasn’t particularly skilled or gifted at playing the viola, and at times I even detested going to class or practicing. It was the familial environment that being in orchestra for that long of a time period that was enough for me to stay, and stay happily.
Our after school gatherings are ingrained in my mind as a simpler time, back when the biggest worry was passing our AP exams, or finding a comfortable way of piling into my best friend’s SUV to grab boba (he was the first one out of all of us to get his license!). What the future held was scary, of course, a sentiment that I’ve come to realize never changes. What schools would we end up at? Would we still talk and hang out as much? When would we be able to see each other amongst our busy schedules? Such questions, and by extension fear, often stems from the lack of a concrete answer coupled with the unease that being at the behest of the future holds.
I was blissfully ignorant of just what exactly would transpire within the next few years. But how can any of us be so sure anyway? It wasn’t so much out of choice, as hindsight is always 20/20 (ironically the year where everything went to shit), but more a combination of youthful positivity and a general lack of experience. After all, you can only know how the movie plays out once the credits roll.
Fast forward to now, as I write this essay in the closing days of one of my last summer breaks, on the verge of my senior year of college. Things have changed, naturally, and I find myself occasionally replaying major events or interactions that’ve transpired in recent months, or even years–wondering what I could’ve, or should’ve, done to change the outcome. It’s an exercise in futility though, as the past never changes. It only informs the present and by extension, future actions. This awareness isn’t groundbreaking though, as it’s simply the way life’s chronology plays out.
Instead, I find myself more concerned with my place in all of it, attempting to situate my past, present, and future comfortably into a sequence that doesn’t make me feel any worry, regret, anxiousness, or fear.
But in trading unease for comfort, I’m also choosing to trade growth for stagnancy: a deal I don’t want to make–growth is necessary, no matter how much we oppose it sometimes. So I continue to toil in this purgatory of anxiety, as I’m sure many others are. I miss certain people, but I no longer see them. I’m occupied with school and focusing on prospective opportunities, while also gearing up for grad school in the coming months, along with all the highs and lows associated with such an undertaking.
Perhaps nothing is scarier than unease about change, or what’s next to come, coupled with a desire for what was. The rose-tinted glasses are fun to wear, but the tint is also what makes the blurry at times. It isn’t all bad to put them on from time to time, but ultimately, all the directions life pulls us in requires mindfulness and living in the present, no matter how much we may not want to face it at times.
I wouldn’t consider myself a musician anymore at this point. I haven’t touched my viola in years, and I was never stellar to begin with anyway. But I still carry certain skills with me that I’ve learned from music that won’t go away anytime soon. For example, in music, the practice known as sight-reading involves the reading and performance of a piece of music that has not been seen or practiced previously. At face value, it can be described as going in blind, as the performer hasn’t seen this specific piece of music before. In truth though, sight-reading requires one to perform a multitude of tasks such as scanning the piece for certain sequences, intervals, time signature changes (if any), all while being familiar with notes and scales that may come into play. As such, sight-reading isn’t exactly going in blind, but more so using all your prior skills and applying them to a new, foreign, never-before-seen situation in an attempt to perform the piece adequately.
Being unsure of what happens next is a song life sings for all of us–a drawn-out practice in sight-reading: we may not know what the future will bring next specifically, but we can hope to face whatever it is by using the knowledge learned in our past to inform our decisions in the present.
Music is, after all, the universal language of humanity, the soul, the mind, and the body. It’s a language that teaches us to not only live, but to survive. And that’s a beautiful thing to take comfort in.