Who is orchestrating this life, anyway?

Orchestras.  We know how they work.  There are a whole lot of different instruments, playing different notes, all of which combine to make music.  The musical threads are intricately woven together, hopefully producing something balanced and in harmony.  Everyone plays in tune, when all is going well, and the end result is a single noun, a piece of music, an entity.

As someone who has spent multiple decades backstage watching orchestras perform, I know all too well how many things can go wrong.  I've been through shows with a conductor taken so violently ill that the musicians had to perform an entire act without any leadership whatsoever.  I've been through shows where the chemistry between the podium and the pit has been so bad that it felt like witnessing someone try to pull a train down a track using a rope held between the teeth.  Painful notes, awkward silences, awful misses.  And I've seen brilliant synchronicity, where it truly felt like the music was flowing from the baton and out into the air, with artless perfection, like it was simply meant to be.

Not a bad metaphor for life.  We are all conductors of a vast orchestration, interweaving melodies of family, work, hobbies, friends, spiritual practices, home improvement projects, aspirations, avocations... there are many instruments that combine to make the music that we call our lives. We strive for balance and harmony.  We struggle to create symphonies of Beethoven-like importance: integrated, beautiful, possessed of a story arc that makes it all sound intentional.  Sometimes we succeed beautifully; other times the whole thing is a discordant fiasco.

When it comes to life orchestration, the issue really is how we spend our time.  And, for most of us, for most of our lives, how we spend our time involves in large part how we earn a living.  Even people who have the luxury of not having to work, still have to work, at something.  Time orchestration affects everyone.

Working for a living is mostly an Unavoidable Other type of activity, but most of us do have choices with how and where we do it.   I earn my daily bread working at a technology company as a technical writer.  It pays well and there's a whole lot about it that works great for me.  I have a lot of creative autonomy and I love and respect my co-workers.  It's close by and my company is a really decent company to work for.  The work itself is not heinous.  I love to write and even though the words are not the words I'd really enjoy writing (like these), I have been able to find ways to engage enough to keep it moderately interesting.  Is it creatively challenging?  Somewhat.  Is it the best use of my talents and skills and energy?  Not really.  Do I rue the fact that I have to sell 40 hours of my week in order to purchase and enjoy the rest of my life?  Totally.

In my process of deconstruction, I am looking at everything, and realize that the entrapment I feel with the fact of working for a living has within it many choices that I have elected to accept. Would I prefer to work full time in theatre, or write creatively full time, or teach, or manage a small business, or any number of other things?  Sure, I would.  But I would be introducing a lot of stress into my life as well.  I free-lanced for years and at a certain point it became clear to me that selling 40 hours a week of my life was going to get me more free time than selling my hours piecemeal.  At the end of the day, given a choice of making money for an hour or working on the latest screenplay... I'd always make the money.

Survival is an interesting thing.  For years I supported myself by working multiple jobs, sacrificing everything to get myself through college, going without food for days on end, being scared to my core that I would not survive.  That's imprinted itself deeply in me.  To me, the only path away from those fears has been to work hard, stay meticulously aware of my finances, and to keep hypervigilent about the wolf that still always feels a whisker's breadth away from the door.

Now, however, my survival concerns are physical.  I have a direct threat within my body that is being countered by strong medications that are also threatening.  But my amygdala, that little fight or flight center of my brain, doesn't register this.  It's still pretty concerned about keeping the wolf away, even though the threat is now internal.  And I keep weighing the two survival issues, because it's possible that the new moth I am becoming may need to rethink how she spends her time. 

All of these conflicting deep responses inform the answer to the question of who is orchestrating this life.  Who is the conductor?  Who's in charge here?  Well, I am.  And I'm not.  Part of what orchestrates my life are causes and conditions that happened long ago, some of which are obsolete, and some of which may still be in effect.  I do not have full control over how everything works out, and it could be argued that I have almost no control over anything.  We try as hard as we can to lead the wayward musicians playing the music of our lives, and hope for the best.

Orchestrating work with the needs of the body, mind, and soul has a lot of challenges.  There are levels of choices and tradeoffs.  In a perfect world, I could wake up every day and design a lifestyle that is perfectly balanced and which supports my mental, physical, and spiritual health completely. And, to the highest extent possible, I can try to do that.  But there are constraints... constraints set by real conditions, constraints set by my own personal choices, and constraints set by years of habitual responses to things from my distant past.

Who is the conductor here?  To the largest extent possible, I need to be.  But I also need to share the podium with shadows from my past, and people for whom I sacrifice in the present, and my own fallible self.  And maybe the way to best orchestrate this life is to simply pay attention to the music itself, endeavoring to serve the work as a whole as sincerely and purely as possible.  Maybe that's how to create those beautiful, meaningful symphonies.  Filled with compassion, and love, and as much harmony as humanly possible.