A balanced life seems to consist of many different areas: work, play, friends, relationship, family, personal growth, physical health, relaxation, home, etc. All of these areas are important to work on and expand, but any time I tilt too strongly into one direction I end up getting some sort of hangover from it. The days when I'm able to address most of these areas in some ways feel like the most enjoyable ones for me.

I find that living a fulfilling life requires A Lot of discipline. Things don't just happen automatically, at least not in my life--I truly have to put in serious effort to feel happy and content on a day-to-day-basis. What makes me happy is forward movement in all of the areas I mentioned earlier. If any of the areas feel stuck, a positive flow is interrupted and a sort of 'Blech...!' takes over the whole picture.

I always love the relaxation, Savasana (corpse pose), at the end of a yoga class. It often feels like the Best Relaxation Ever! It is because I've just seriously exerted myself and feel entitled to it. So it is in life too. Play isn't so much fun, unless you've worked hard to earn it; friendships, family and relationship would all be pretty stagnant without personal growth... Physical health would hardly improve without relaxation, and home...well, if the home is a mess, I feel pretty crappy in all of the other areas. Thus it seems like all of these areas are needed to complement each other.

One of the hardest working friends of mine often says that by nature he would be the "lie-in-bed-naked-and-eat-potato-chips-all-day"-dude. I can certainly relate to that. There's always some part of me that doesn't want to be bothered to do anything. But, knowing the hangovers of an unbalanced life on the one hand, and the fulfilling feeling of accomplishment on the other, well...my choice is clear. It's just a matter of remembering this and making the effort consistently, every day.

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”
- Albert Einstein (theoretical physicist, 1879–1955)

I'm writing my music alone for the very first time with this new material that I'm creating. Yes, there have been some tunes on my earlier albums that I've written fully on my own, but never a full project. And I have to say, while this is very exciting, it is also extremely daunting. I almost feel like it's been a truth that I've been running away from, even as it's been in front of my eyes. I've come up with a billion different ways of distracting myself from it--all kinds of unproductive thinking...but I think it's time to face up to it. Sink or swim, this is My Project. This is My Responsibility. Scary yes, but also very fucking cool..!

Creativity is an interesting animal. Mine doesn't like the daily stimulus of the computer, emails, phone calls, New York hustle and bustle. At all. It requires space and time and quietude, an opportune moment to be captured and played with. It flees very quickly when it hears a suggestion of chores, the word 'should' or self-criticism. All of this ought to be banished from the mind when one gets lucky enough to be stricken by inspiration. (Easier said than done, sometimes...)

In this world we live in, being creative can be challenging. I personally think it's a whole different ball-game than what it must have been in decades past, when there was no internet for example... And even further back, when there was no TV. These days even just the city and the computer will create enough noise to fill out any space for creativity, if one lets them. Though I've once viewed quiet time a luxury,
I now view it as a prerequisite to be able to create anything; I actually now see it as part of my work. And with that, I settle into an evening of guilt-free steeping, letting the reality sink in... It's My frickin' project.... Wow.

"Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it."
- Dee Hock

I just went to see the Punch Brothers last night at New York's Town Hall.
Originally I only went there to see my favorite new artist Jesca Hoop, who was opening up for them and didn't really care about the Punch Brothers, as I hadn't really heard much of their stuff before this... But wow. I am fucking floored. This was one of, if not the best concert I've ever seen. I couldn't think of a more powerful bill: joyous, fierce, emotional... The combination of the two acts was impeccable!

Sometimes you see concerts like this where you end up feeling like you've wasted your whole fucking life. You see someone doing something so well that it hardly seems humanly possible.... I mean, the cover of Kid A that the Punch Brothers performed? What the hell?? Unfuckingbelievable. The musicianship, the abandon, the obvious love for their craft and the originality of the music... Ah! It makes me emotional right now.

I have been carrying a lot of sadness and anger around this week, for the many injustices of my life. It's a grieving process that's ongoing and utterly healthy actually. It pisses me off that I've had to waste so much time on this crap instead of being able to work on what I love in this world. But getting the anger and sadness out will enable me to sink my teeth into all those things that inspire me. Suppressing these feelings is the block that's created between me and the world: anxiety. A performance like the one I witnessed last night reminds me of why I do what I do; why I constantly want to evolve, why I love music, why it's so important in this world....
I thank the universe for experiences like this.

I was just lying on the floor for a long time, listening to music, (Piers Faccini and Kings of Convenience..) experimenting on relaxation and inner peace... Ah, what a revelation! Do people really live like this? At peace with themselves? I want it. Badly. Old habits die hard, and it has required substantial amounts of rewiring of my brain to even allow myself to relax. Though people tend to see me as quite zen on the outside (..?), I have always been full of turmoil.

Figuring out some important piece about life one day doesn't mean that one remembers it on the next. So far, the pendulum is always swinging... This has become very obvious to me throughout my process of healing. My life has for a while felt like a series of triumphs and relapses, back to back at varying intervals. The hardest habit for me to kick is negative thinking. That shit was pumped into my veins and into my consciousness ever since I was a child... But it is probably hard to find a human being in this world who is as determined to be free from negative thoughts. For me it is a matter of life and death... But in all honesty, I think it is that for everyone. One cannot truly Live, if one is inundated with negativity.

The good thing about pendulums is that they eventually stop swinging. Apparently due to friction and gravity... My pendulum is certainly slowing down. I'm creating both the friction and the gravity by becoming more and more focused on Truth and Reality, goddammit. Those two very rarely correspond to the negative depictions of the mind. This is merely accurate. Where the pendulum stops must lie some sort of peace. I see glimpses of it already.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment”

- Marcus Aurelius (my hero!)

I walk a fine line with my blog sometimes, in wanting to express my emotions, in wanting to connect, and yet not expose myself and my life entirely. I find that line especially challenging to tread today, as most of what I'm experiencing right now I feel fragile and protective about. Indeed, I feel quite vulnerable now, despite being stronger than ever. Perhaps it's a function of being more present....

In the recent and coming weeks, I am opening myself up to many things that I've been protecting myself from... In short, I am deciding to trust--myself, my surroundings, people. It's a choice, interestingly enough. I didn't even realize that I had surrounded myself with all these walls, pretty much all of my life; walls of distracting fears that shielded me from true interactions and true connections. It used to be a form of self-protection and it had its place. But now these walls that used to be my best friend are my biggest obstacle.

I understand now that connection with others is what makes life worth fighting for; to allow myself to be seen, and to see and experience others as they truly are. It may take some time for my walls to come down, but I have a good view of what's on the other side now. Brick by brick, I am undoing this distance and isolation.

In case you haven't seen this yet, it's definitely worth a gander:

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html

One of my favorite stories as a child was The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen... Here's the opening of it, as stolen from Wikipedia:

"An evil troll, actually the devil himself, makes a magic mirror that has the power to distort the appearance of things reflected in it. It fails to reflect all the good and beautiful aspects of people and things while it magnifies all the bad and ugly aspects making them look even worse than they actually are.

The devil teaches a "devil school," and he and his pupils delight in taking the mirror throughout the world to distort everyone and everything. They enjoy how the mirror makes the loveliest landscapes look like "boiled spinach." They then want to carry the mirror into heaven with the idea of making fools of the angels and God, but the higher they lift it, the more the mirror grins and shakes with delight. It shakes so much that it slips from their grasp and falls back to earth where it shatters into billions of pieces — some no larger than a grain of sand. These splinters are blown around and get into people's hearts and eyes, making their hearts frozen like blocks of ice and their eyes like the troll-mirror itself, only seeing the bad and ugly in people and things."

Long story short: main character Kai gets these splinters in his heart and in his eye and turns into a cold and loveless boy. He then joins the Snow Queen in her frozen, cruel kingdom, leaving behind his happy childhood and his loving friend Gerda. Spoiler alert!!!!!! Love melts his heart in the end.

After all these years that story came to my mind today, as I actually had a feeling that my own heart is melting...! Hans Christian Andersen must have known something about losing and reclaiming innocence himself, having written such a story.

Love is the one thing that I find even the smartest people fail to describe in a way that doesn't sound trite. I was able to find one quote that truly touched me though and here it is:

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
-Zelda Fitzgerald

Right now I'm reading a book called Tom Waits on Tom Waits, Interviews and Encounters. Sheer brilliance! Much like his music, his interviews allow readers to immerse themselves into his world... And what a world it is! Tom Waits seems to inhabit his own reality: a gritty, raw, dark, but warm place simultaneously existing today and some time in the 1940's. As I swim through these articles of him with his anecdotes, witty one-liners and his ruggedly captivating persona as described by his many interviewers, I find myself walking differently, noticing details and places I haven't noticed before... Oddly enough, I find myself connecting to myself more--a truer, more honest part of myself.

Great art and true artists have the capacity to inspire us to experience the world in a new way. Certain artists actually motivate me to live a more meaningful and fulfilling life, reminding me through their work that I can choose to live each day in a way that counts; that every moment is an opportunity to be singularly, fabulously myself. For that reason alone, art is a driving force in my world.

I heard a story that during the Second World War, Winston Churchill’s finance minister said Britain should cut arts funding to support the war effort. According to rumor, Churchill’s response was this: “Then what are we fighting for?”

Indeed. Our birthright and a basic need for all of us is creativity. The world we live in these days does not encourage this. Instead it often feels as if the powers that be try to make us all fit into the same neat box, labeled "Consumer." It requires daily bravery to live our lives in a creative and individual way. I thank the universe for people like Tom Waits, who show the rest of us that there are many different paths to choose from. Out of 7 billion paths, (hopefully) we choose the one meant for us.