2/28/24 It Takes Courage Just To Be Hopeful

I don’t know if it’s just me, but it sure does seem like there are plenty of reasons to despair these days.

No matter which side of the political spectrum you may be on, just thinking about politics probably raises your blood pressure just a little. Or maybe a lot.

You don’t have to look too far on TV or social media to find tragedy, brutality and almost unimaginable examples of a complete loss of ethics and moral decency.

And if that doesn’t pummel your sensibilities into submission, maybe a few moments with the facts about climate change will finish off any optimism or hope you ever had for the future.

It seems that if you are not jaded, cynical, bitter, hopeless and full of despair, you must be either naïve or completely out of touch.

Or truly courageous.

I heard a director in an interview recently talking about how he cast a particular actor for a part. He needed an older male actor to play the part of a very happy, optimistic older character, but he knew he had to look outside of Hollywood because every older actor in Hollywood that he’d met (who wasn’t already a big movie star) would be too bitter to play the part.

He said that most older actors who hadn’t “made it” were bound to be living with unfulfilled dreams, regrets about past failures, disappointments and missed opportunities and a host of justifications for bitterness and cynicism, which would have made them unsuitable to play a truly optimistic character.

It struck me, as an older guy in the arts myself, how easy it is to fall into that trap and about how many times I’ve had to be willfully optimistic in the face of constant disappointments.

For many musicians and almost all actors, it’s almost like a gambler who feels like this time they’re going to hit the jackpot. This demo is going to get that record deal! This gig is the one where I get discovered! This connection is going to open important doors and lead to new opportunities! This audition is going to win that dream gig!

Until it doesn’t.

For most sane people, they can only take so much disappointment before they find a less psychologically painful way to make a living.

But for those who stick around as performers, we discover that either we have become the bitter, disappointed people we hoped we would never be, or we have found a way to move forward with our optimism undimmed.

It’s not that we’re fools or naïve. It’s that we have stood up to disappointment so many times that we are no longer afraid of it. We have no fear of failure. We are not afraid that our talents may go unrecognized by our peers. We know that life is cruel and we persist anyway.

This is not foolishness. This is actually courage. To fight like David in front of Goliath. To know the odds are against you but to try anyway because that's just what you do, and you're pretty sure that when all the latest news is long forgotten, the great art that was produced is what will be remembered.

No one but historians remember the name of the political leaders of central Germany in the early 1800’s, but we all remember Beethoven and the opening notes of the 5th Symphony. What wars were happening during Bach’s lifetime? Not sure, but we all remember Bach.

Creativity endures because it is born out of the courage of hopefulness and it speaks only to our own hope and courage, not to our fear. Fear is the language of politicians.

We can’t control what happens in the world. We can only control how we react to it. And in a world that shows us a million reasons to give up hope, art inspires us to go on.

Creativity gives us the courage to be hopeful.

Groove on

--Tracy

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