Doing It Now

"I don’t like to look back, because
the whole point in jazz is doing it now."
--Scott LaFaro

I was going to make this an essay about failure. Instead it's just going to be the first blog entry. It's often said that we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes, but I think that people mean a kind of "acute" failure, as in an attempt that goes horribly wrong. But what about chronic, repeated, overarching failure? And by failure here, I mean something that matters to you, something you really want. That's what I am going to explore here. Long, painful, slow failure.

So I'll start with the only class I failed in college, and by "fail" here I mean straight-up zero-point-zero failure. When I failed my music theory class in the Fall of 1987, it blew a Sousaphone-sized hole in my grade point average. But more than that, it cemented a perception in my mind about my ability to understand and speak the language of music: you simply can't do this.

The bottom line is this: despite my failure in the past, I should just start "doing it now." Work on it now. You have all the materials. And how about you log on every Friday to say how it's going?

Give it a try. Do it now.