Recently I received this evaluation after a presentation, "We were all laughing so hard, I seriously wondered whether we were ever going to get to any important stuff!"

I was raised in a world where excess is a dirty word. (We were careful to avoid all things wasteful or extravagant or decadent... excessive laughter included.)  I assimilated and absorbed life in the school of antiseptic gardening, requiring, even demanding, a well-mannered well-modulated world. That is, all things in their correct places. Above all, tidy and evenly spaced, with no threat of overflow, for there nothing touches. I chose to strive for what was proper and tasteful. Unobtrusive and correct. The thought of intoxication as a prerequisite for my soul was utter heresy!

(It reminds me of the story about a Sunday School class concerning moral behavior. "Tell me," asked the teacher, "what must we do before we can expect forgiveness for our sins?" One boy raised his hand. "Well first," the boy said, "we gotta go sin.")  

It's just that I excelled (cum laude and all that) in the school where image is everything, measured against the requirement to do things "correctly." So it is no surprise that all areas of my life were carefully scripted. At the same time, my Midwestern religious heritage taught me to never feel prideful or exuberant of possessions or skills or accomplishments. So I kept all of my emotions in check, meting out only those that others or I deemed appropriate. I went overboard protecting myself against the sin immoderation.

Avoiding the pit of being at the mercy of my feelings, that discomfiting place where passions rage and demons howl, where colors bubble and explode, where one is no longer in control, no longer strained, as the heart--not to be trusted--wildly races. For incentive, and to stay the course of control, I carried in my mind pictures of men with puffed scarlet faces, contemptible and pitied. I was above that, surely.  And the result is that there was a part of myself, this cauldron of passions, I entombed. Of what was I afraid?

Your guess is as good as mine. However you slice it, there is to be sure, a price to be paid for living this way--all emotions restricted, close to the chest. The payoff is certainly for the short run, while we still enjoy the apparent rewards for our protectiveness, as the world feels manageable and comfortable. Meanwhile, our enemies--our fears--are kept at bay by true grit.

But down the road, something snaps. While I sit on the back deck, the sun sets overt the Kitsap Peninsula (the expanse of land west of Seattle and Puget Sound). The sky, as if batter poured from a pitcher, turns an effluence of slate blue and vermilion. Spires of hemlock are backlit and silhouetted like hand puppets on an immense screen. I stand for some unknown reason, singing, "Jeremiah was a bullfrog. Was a good friend of mine..." at the top of my lungs, and do a little boogie with my dog, who hasn't the foggiest idea what's come over me but is a sucker for a party and plays along nonetheless.  

I let the moment melt around me before I gain my composure and give myself some sort of reality check: a quiz requiring justification for what I'm feeling and why. And then it hits me. I can't tell a soul about my dance at twilight without coming face-to-face with who I was pretending not to be and the energy it required to maintain that image.

When I lived in Southern California, I spent three days a month at a Benedictine monastery out in the high desert. It was my periodic trek to a place where I could slow down long enough to pay attention. Truth is, I wanted to learn how to be alone with myself and like it, because I wasn't very good at that. And, I wanted to learn how to be alone with God and like it, because I wasn't very good at that, either.

On one visit, a friend asked one of the monks, "What exactly do you do here?"

"We pray," the monk replied simply.

"No, really," my friend persisted. "I mean besides that. What do you really do?"

"It is enough just to pray," the monk told my friend.

"It is enough," I tell my dog standing on the deck absorbing the summer sky, "just to boogie." Just to boogie under the inexplicable marbled canopy of dusk. Just to feel your lungs swell and your heart flutter. Just to cheer the sun as it sets and not give a damn about some need to fight back the tears, standing spellbound in the salty prism for twilight rainbows.

When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them that the professional musician should aspire to be the state of the beginner... One needs to constantly remind oneself to play with the abandon of the child who is just learning the cello. Because why is that kid playing? He is playing for pleasure. Yo-Yo Ma