Nowhere is the New Somewhere

“Teach us to care and not to care.
Teach us to sit still.”
- From “Ash Wednesday”, T.S. Eliot

For a couple of years, I worked semi-regularly on the Toronto subway system as a busker. I played my songs with my guitar case open, while people streamed by. Sometimes they offered a few coins or words of encouragement, but for the most part it was a non-paying gig. It was also a “fish-out-of-water” experience: I was deliberately placing myself in a situation where my music would most likely be ignored, to see if I could make peace with that experience.

It was my belief then, as it is now, that most individual singer-songwriters (if not most artists of any kind) will do their work outside the commercial marketplace and will, as a result, need to find a different way to assess the value of their work. We will need to “make peace with” in two ways: become reconciled to any level of success or lack of it we achieve, while creating peace in the world at the same time.

One of the most powerful elements of the subway experience, for me, was the sensation of standing still, when the rest of the world was moving fast, headed somewhere. I, by contrast, was going nowhere, both literally and figuratively. In fact, I appeared to many observers to occupy the lowest rung of going nowhere, because to them I looked like a beggar. The truth is that in Toronto, subway musicians are selected through a formal audition process and receive official licenses; the vast majority of performers have other sources of income and are not busking for financial survival. But I could tell that many passers-by didn’t know that, because even though I was well-dressed, attractive and professional, I often received looks of pity—and sometimes even donations of food! It sometimes seemed that the open guitar case, with its connotations of desperation or hopelessness, made more of an impression than the music itself.

Because of that public perception, busking became an opportunity to practice letting go of status and importance…to play with the idea that I was both important and unimportant at the same time, that I was both visible and invisible, and that my songs were both very loud (thanks to the natural amplification of the tiled corridors) and virtually unheard. I was experimenting with—in fact, challenging—my own perceptions of status and value in society, improvising ways to adjust to a situation where I was not valued as highly as I wanted to be, while playing my instrument. (When I felt comfortable and relaxed while busking, I could also say that I was feeling playful and having fun, but I have to admit, those times were rare.)

In the past, when I saw my songs as vehicles to “get me somewhere” or to attract attention, I was unable to play with—to dance with—the fact of my songs’ unimportance. I wanted “official” performance settings, prestigious stages, stamps of approval from influential people in the entertainment industry. I saw songwriting and performance as a transaction: I write the song and sing it for you; you applaud and pay me! If the applause and payment weren’t forthcoming, perhaps I just had to write a little differently or sing a little better. Or connect more regularly with more fans, or get played on a different radio show, or fix up my MySpace page, or…the list went on.

When I was busking, I saw it as a transaction at first, too. I expected there to be a clear relationship between the song I sang and the amount of money dropped into the case. For much of the time, I was engaged in a continual adjustment of myself to attract more of those elusive coins. Every once in awhile, though, the sheer joy of playing (as a child plays) would lift me out of my constant state of evaluation and expectation, to simply be in the moment and offer up my song. Sometimes that effervescence would attract someone’s attention and gratitude and sometimes it wouldn’t; the point, though, was that the lighter and less-attached offering was truly bigger and more valuable than the reward offered by the economic currency of that moment. The heart-expanding experience of allowing a song to fill an empty space without expectation of reward made the reward itself virtually insignificant.

If you are an artist, you don’t have to work as a busker to understand the feeling of “going nowhere” in our society’s eyes. As artists, we often find ourselves in situations that seem low-status in an economically-driven world. Some of these situations are very well-described, in works of art that reflect their own creators’ quest for meaning and desire to be valued. For example, we can all picture the musician playing to the near-empty bar in Billy Joel’s classic song “Piano Man”—the artist so fine, everyone wonders why he isn’t famous.

But there are other places, too, less stereotyped and familiar, where artists experience this “going nowhere”. Formal rejections and un-won contests can trigger feelings of immobility and isolation, as can countless other more personal experiences. It’s easy to feel you’re going nowhere when you’re singing at a family gathering and a relative turns away and starts checking his email. Or when you volunteer at a local library and one person shows up for your performance…by mistake! Or even when you offer to sing for a seriously ill friend, and she cannot accept your gift because she is too uncomfortable and sensitive to sound to listen.

These are “going nowhere” situations. No matter how “good” we get at what we do—how proficient we become at our craft, how skilled we become at networking—we will keep finding ourselves in that state of uncomfortable nowhere. It’s not only the artist’s life, it’s the human one. We tend not to get to where we think we’re going…to where we think we want to go. We tend to end up somewhere else. Inevitably, despite all of our efforts, we end up exactly where we are: inside our own skin. Until we really inhabit that place, the ordinariness that has nothing to do with glamour or praise or fame or money, we will neither be fulfilled as songwriters nor will we write meaningful songs.

Meditation practice can help us learn to be at peace in the “nowhere”—in the persistent lack of whatever “somewhere” we seek. When we sit still, focusing on our breathing, we learn to remain in lack of movement, in stillness. The world passes by, thoughts come and go (as do people and events) and we sit, in acceptance, taking up a limited but distinct space within the world. In one guided meditation I learned recently, the teacher invited us to imagine ourselves surrounded by a bell shape, and to fill that space with our breath. For me, the metaphor of a bell was especially powerful, because I could envision a song within that did not extend beyond borders, one that was perfectly balanced and full and resonant yet still.

If we learn let go of the constant quest to “get somewhere” with our music, we can relax into our present experience and let feelings of disappointment and failure fall away. When that happens, we might notice that the overlay of constant striving, the continual evaluation of where we are on some kind of imaginary map, distracts us from simply observing and experiencing the life that we have: a life that would, if we let it, inspire songs rich in meaning and depth.