Wednesday, February 26, 2014

The Irrevocable Unfinishedness of Life

The older I get the less I feel like I've "arrived."

Maybe that's why I post on here a lot less. I've been in learning mode. It's hard to write like you know something when you're learning that you don't.

I recently remodeled my garage so that I could use it for a studio. I needed a place to work where I could be free of distractions. My requirements were that it would be warm, dry, and relatively quiet. 

"Function over fashion" is a saying I try to live by, so when it came time for drywall, I only bought enough for the walls. I did the ceiling above the studio monitors with some leftovers so I could sound-treat it, and with the scraps from that I put a panel above the drum set.

The rest of the "cathedral-style" ceiling is insulation-batts covered in clear plastic sheeting stapled to the studs. It's got that "unfinished" vibe. 

Kind of like my life.

It's funny to me that when I was younger I really felt like I'd arrived. Like I had read enough books and picked enough brains to finally understand how everything was. But life taught me that there is no official arrival. Something always comes up, or the same thing comes back around again.

Kristie feels it too. Is there an end to the laundry? To the cleaning? To the dinner prep? It seemingly never stops.

You could sum up the recording process, a process I'm living in right now, with this concept of "unfinishedness." 

With recording, nothing ever seems done, because technically you could edit forever. At some point you've comped, edited, and printed, and you have to move on... but part of you knows that you're just moving on for now, that you'll be back, at vocal time, at mix time, to move some of those notes around.

So I sit in my studio, working, editing, fading, scrolling, dragging, zooming in and out, listening to takes, hemming and hawing. 

Occasionally I glance up from my unfinished work at my unfinished ceiling and think about my unfinished dreams.

I think about how crazy it is that I'm here now, and about how uncomfortable I am to stay.

And then I get back to the work at hand; listening, hearing, changing, sifting through the irrevocable unfinishedness of life.

5 comments:

  1. Are you finding that there contentment in that? I think I see that coming in my own life, the concept of unfinishedness. I'm a checklist person, it's how I've been able to survive getting assignments done in my undergrad, but you can't really check off life. There are aspects of my life, and in my faith, that I wish I have moved past from but it still comes up again and it creates a sense of discontentment and frustration.

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  2. Go back to the long hair Matt. Before its too late. Nice seeing you in Hawaii.

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  3. Go back to the long hair Matt. Before its too late. Nice seeing you in Hawaii.

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  4. Go back to the long hair Matt. Before its too late. Nice seeing you in Hawaii.

    ReplyDelete