Music education always & always looking forward.

Do It Anyway

If you start to write a blog about what you do for a living, people will be judgmental and tell you that there are dozens of other correct ways to do it.  

Write it anyway.

If you teach, especially in an extremely visible medium, you are open to lots of criticism and the possibility of turning people off.

Teach it anyway.  

If you try new things, people will complain that society is letting go of all of its old traditions.  

Try them anyway.

If you protect the traditions of any culture, people will accuse you of not being willing to move forward and let go of the past. 

Project them anyway.

If you talk about your failures, or your missed opportunities, people will blame you for the things you weren't able to accomplish and possibly congratulate themselves that they haven't experienced same misses.

Talk about them anyway.

I always loved statements like that, as an original group of them was credited to Mother Teresa but originally written by Keith M. Kent in 1968 & included in a book for student leaders.  The statements, which follow this sort of pattern (e.g. people are terrible jerks & you should love them anyway) were referred to by Kent as The Paradoxical Commandments.  

Or, y'know, you could just watch Ben Folds Five sing about it with some Fraggles.

 

p.s. - This video is impossible not to love.

The Spoons Are Shifting: Changing Meter in Soundgarden's "Spoonman"

A Year in the Life