colleen

It is one thing to intellectually understand the proverbial truth of the “two sides of the coin”, it is another to truly emotionally accept it. Perhaps that was my main problem in the past with live playing: I fantasized about a magic carpet that would enable me to just land in the venue, play and then go home, without all the stuff that can go wrong in real life travelling.

Last spring, I started to educate myself on Buddhism. I am fascinated by the accuracy of its views on human nature and psychological suffering: in a nutshell, we cling to what we want, reject what we don’t want, and mistakenly believe that happiness would come *if only* we could have just what we want and avoid what we don’t want. This spoke loudly to me, and although I am not a Buddhist, I have tried to act upon this in the way I emotionally react to things not going my way.

The US tour proved to be a perfect testing ground: it started wonderfully with a perfect flight to JFK and a perfect show at Public Records, but things soon took a different turn over 5 consecutive days. Philly was hit by a tropical storm and my performance at Making Time was postponed, then cancelled. The morning of flying to Toronto, I nearly missed my flight as I had not been told I needed an Electronic Travel Authorization. After the Toronto show, my friend Joni Void accidentally broke my suitcase, which I realized the next day at Pearson International Airport… only to be told a few minutes later that I was at the wrong airport. By the time I landed in Chicago, I was in desperate need of rest, but instead had to go and buy a new suitcase at Target, which took a good 2 hours since I had to check if all my gear fitted. The next day, I was told that the suitcase was 2 kilos too heavy, and I was plagued by this problem for the rest of the tour.

Amazingly, and in a first for me, I managed to let the stress roll over me without dwelling over each episode, and I felt very deeply that this was just “the other side of the coin”: I can’t have the amazingness of live shows without the risk-taking of touring.

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