Being moved

I have just begun to learn to play Memory from Cats. Andrew Lloyd Webber is not my favourite composer but this music is OK (My teacher gave me the right to veto it!) and it is a useful piece to practice some piano skills to. Last night my piano teacher Rebecca played it through for me. I was very moved by her playing, lifted up and got tearful. She has a real talent as a performer but has not performed in years.

I would die for such talent. Indeed with only a fraction of such talent I would be out there performing but that's me. Rebecca's extensive high powered training as a musician had a closing down or spoiling effect on her as a performer.

Part of me has always been shy almost reclusive but another part which seems to get bigger is, for want of another word, a performer. I love working with people around stuff that interests me and touches me and them. Thankfully I no longer feel drawn to being a therapist but I love facilitating people's doctorate study (how weird is that?). I love teaching mature students who are often eager and motivated to learn. I love speaking to 400 people for an hour at conferences and I love working all day with 20 people in a workshop on spirituality. And I love performing my poems usually as a Manky poet.

My career as an academic is probably on its way out as I have lost the urge and energy to keep holding the space that I believe needs to be held, the currents in my institution and in me are flowing away from this. I would need a lot of holding and support to carry this work on beyond the next year or so and frankly no-one apart from some of my students gives a damn and that is ok.

But I want to continue to touch people through my spoken and written words and of course through my silences. I want to continue to spark others to find their voices. And If I ever get to grow a musical talent inside me one hundredth that of Rebecca's I will be out their playing!

I was and still am a small town boy who 'jumped the tracks' by going to a Grammar School - thank God - and this and a student grant(!) got me easily out of the town I was born into which I could never go back to. I found people able to echo back to me who I was and so began the long slow, too slow perhaps finding my place in the world. I can never forgot that early gap between who I was and the place and family I was born into. Education has saved my life in a very real existential sense.

So? well find a way to be more of who you are and less of who you think you ought to be and that way some kind of fulfilment and happiness lies.