Preview: The Secret To Achieving World Peace Is...

       Respect is one of the most necessary building blocks of world peace; not only respect for each other, but for ourselves and everything around us. In our society, so much goes against this idea. For instance, we’re raised to believe that self-respect and income level are correlated, and that those who bring in more dough have a greater respect for themselves, and demand a greater respect from others. How many parents have said to their children, “Do something lucrative, get a real job, stop banging on your drums all day”? Part of learning self-respect is to learn your strengths, and what truly makes you happy. Lots of people put away their drums and get a “real” job, and, if that’s not what makes them happy, they become self-important pricks. They’re the ones who say “A job’s not supposed to make you happy, or else it wouldn’t be a job.” They’re the ones who believe the s**t should run downstream in a company, and instead of protecting their employees, they dump on them.
       Add to this the importance our society puts on celebrity. Not the crafts of acting or singing or dancing, etc. But celebrity. All someone has to do is tune into any given reality show to know that very few contestants have a respect for the actual craft. This goes hand-in-hand with another foil to self-respect: impatience. We want what we want right now. Watch the first third of the American Idol season, and you’ll see a bunch of sad hacks who try out to be celebrities. Not singers, celebrities. Most of those people would never want to put in the effort to become a singer: the dedication, the study, the technique, the experience of performance, what the rules are and when to break them, the full-day rehearsals before shows that last well into late night/early morning, the fear of a sinus infection, the knowledge that your next paycheck rests on the fingers of your guitarist who’s semi-reliable, or a drummer who can’t keep time, or a punk kid keyboardist. Nobody who just wants celebrity sees any of that. For so many of that first batch of Idol wannabes, most of the singing they’ve ever done is in the chorus of their high school musical. Or karaoke at a family reunion, where grandma with the hearing aid paid them a compliment. Or in their room, their car, their shower. And yet, because they were given a compliment or a high school success, because of that one experience, they think they’re the best thing that’s happened to music since Emile Berliner. And they don’t even know who that is because they’re too impatient to look it up.
       I am certainly not immune to this condition. My impatience is one of my biggest downfalls. One of the areas in my life where I used to be most impatient was with my writing. But a few years ago, a friend gave me a little book by Monica Wood, called The Pocket Muse. It’s full of advice and anecdotes and snippets geared to help writers, especially beginners, move past their initial block. It’s a gem of a tool, and in one of her anecdotes, Wood talks about the writer’s apprenticeship. It takes at least a good ten years of experience and learning and dedication for a writer to get to a point where she can look at her work and identify clichés, tell the difference between what she thinks is good and what is actually good, have the objectivity to know what work served its purpose as a one-time exercise versus what should be sent to publishers. Whenever I start to feel impatient about myself as a writer, I remember Wood’s last sentence in this account: “Respect the apprenticeship.” I imagine the apprenticeship is necessary for success in any discipline, be it writing or singing or cleaning sink drains. In that time, you don’t just become knowledgeable, you also learn how to cope and jam with the unexpected opportunities or obstacles that get hurled at you.