Questions + Answers

2022 Number 2

Hi Substack friends. I hope you enjoy this question and answer series, which I hope to post weekly, on Fridays. It means the world to me to have you here, so thank you again for joining me, and thank you for providing these great new questions. I’ll be answering them in the order they were received.

If you’d like to contribute a question, go to the post dated Feb 7, 2022 and leave it there.

---

Thank you, Peter C., for this great question.

---

If you hadn’t become a singer-songwriter and writer, what do you think you would have been doing now?

Dear Peter,

This is a great question and something I think about every day because I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.

People’s lives can go in many different directions these days and I’m no different. Despite having faced some hard economic realities at times, I’ve always been a person who has experienced tremendous privilege and could’ve found a way to take most paths I might’ve thought I wanted to take. But I remember sitting at the kitchen table in the duplex I shared with my sister in Nashville one January morning in 1994, making an envelope out of gift wrapping paper and thinking about how I was going to sustain myself with a creative life. I wasn’t even sure what kind it was going to be, but I’d seen enough of the world at that point to know I wanted to see more of it and that I wouldn’t do that very easily sitting in an office 50 weeks out of year. I’d sat in them before and would again after that morning, but I knew that my 401k contributions were probably not going to be getting matched by a corporation. I gave up folding wrapping paper into envelopes, but that I folded it at all revealed to me that I needed to be using my hands and my creative energy as much as life would allow.

I had no idea how much work being a working artist actually is. The self-employed person has to be disciplined because not only is there no one making me get to work, there’s no one telling me I’m done. I’ve had to find an off switch and it hides. I digress.

What would I be doing? I’ve always loved working with clothes and also interior spaces so that wouldn’t be a stretch. It wouldn’t surprise me if I worked with plants in some way — I have thoughts about getting a job in a nursery even now so I can learn more about growing things. I may do that yet. There have been times I thought I might’ve made a decent lawyer. Definitely librarian sciences. Curating, creative directing, that kind of thing.

What I see when I zoom out from that is a desire for organized creativity. And that makes a lot of sense.

It’s an interesting time. Not only in the world, but for me personally. I’ve never been so excited to be here, in what I have taken to calling human being school. Whatever my choices in life, I can’t be sorry that they have brought me to this moment. In some ways it has taken me so very long to get here, to a peaceful and grateful place. In some ways I am humbled by the fast track I received. I am still learning and always will be, but G-d put a lot of things in my path that demanded I be as aware of the moment as I could comprehend how to be.

Some people never get there.

Whatever it is that I ultimately end up doing, and just typing that is exciting because I am genuinely open to what comes next, I hope that it is with a prayer in my heart to continue to learn and to keep becoming better — more empathetic, loving, kind, and curious. That’s my only goal for the next 50, to just get better as a human being, to continue to learn how to love and be loved in all the ways. That’s it.

Y’all have a great weekend.

AM