I feel very fortunate to have realized just how important it is to wake up every day and do what I love for a living. I feel very grateful that I'm making a good living with a guitar in my hands and it just seems to get better every month. I've spent a lot of time this past year or so asking myself how music, my passion, can best serve others and surprisingly I've come to believe that my main purpose has nothing to do with music directly. I feel the best thing I can do for others is to find a way to inspire them to have the courage to seek their own passion (If they haven't found it or have forgotten what it is) and pursue it. How do we get so far from where we were as children? Why do we go from being energetic, life loving dreamers to exhausted, stressed, bored adults. For me, the answer came from my beautiful little boy.
One of my favourite memories so far as a father was when Caeden was about 18 months old. I was living in a country house at the time. We were outside in the garden on a beautiful summer day and I'll never forget when Caeden picked up a flower and just stared at it so intensely. Completely taken in by a simple flower. He often reminds me to slow down and be aware of the simple beauty that's all around me. Has a child everything is new! New taste, new sights, new movements, new words, sounds, smells, etc. Everyday is full of discoveries. I remember going to get Caeden one morning and seeing him bust out the door of is house shouting "Good morning Sun! Good morning tree! Good morning rock!" So excited just to be alive. Â Â Â Â
   Naturally, everything can't be new everyday for the rest of our lives but the problem is when nothing is new anymore. It starts with school. Learning becomes forced. We go to school and read things that doesn't interest us. Slowly we are told that our dreams if unconventional, are silly and unrealistic. You may see signs in your school that say "be unique, by yourself, ps you must learn the exact same material that every one else is learning and you must learn it the same way everyone else does. You hear the people who love you say things like "You need to get an education, you need to settle down. Stop wasting your time on this and that." It took me years after high school to realize orremember that I actually do enjoy studying, reading and even testing myself. I love it. But in high school...there wasn't even a music class and our sports program was a joke.
For most of us, it just gets worst after high school or post secondary. We settle for some tedious, boring job that again, we have little to no interest in that deep down we know pays way less than our precious time and life energy is worth. But we have to pay the bills, so we stay there in a toxic environment full of other bored underpaid people who spend way too much time and energy bitching about the man (or woman) at the top making "All the money" (Unfortunately I know this from experience). But do we really have to stay there? Are the bills or feeding our kids the real reason? Or are they just the excuses we use because we're scared to go after what we really love for fear that we may we may be doubted, get laughed at, fail, or be forced out of our comfort zone? Quite often when I feel afraid of a challenge ahead I hear the words that my good brother once said to me. "To do something I hate for 8 to 12 hours a day, I'd just as well be dead." You might argue that it's better to still be living but lets face it, the life I'm describing here isn't living, it's slowly dying.
   A few years ago I almost gave up on pursuing my passion. I started listening to the voices in my head saying you're a father now, you can't make a living playing music, it's time to grow up. I signed up to go to university to study psychology. Luckily an unexpected call came from the Stratford festival and I was reminded that you can make damn good money playing music in a creative and exciting environment. It ignited me. I soon realized that being a father wasn't a reason to give up my dreams, it's the biggest reason I need to pursue them. I can tell Caeden all I want that he can do whatever he wants in life but will it really mean anything if I say this after coming home exhausted from a job that I hate? I doubt it. Nothing is more rewarding than having him see daddy doing what he loves every day and seeing how happy I am because of it. Hopefully instead of him seeing pursuing the unconventional as childish, he will think it's silly when people say things like "Of course I'm broke, I'm a musician" or any other kind of negative, self defeating crap that most musicians say. The kind of crap I use to say.
I'm not suggesting you go and quit your job, but can you spare an hour a week to plan or start that  business you've always dreamed of? Would it not be better to do what you love for 10 hours a week and spend 10 hours less doing something that you don't love? Would your kids be better off if dad sacrificed a little less money for more energy, patients and happiness? Is their ipod really more important to them than seeing that it's normal to be a happy, life loving mother who loves monday has much or more than Friday because she traded that boring meaningless job to work in a place where she can help people better their own lives? The way I see it, pursuing our passion and failing to be successful is still more of a success than spending most of our precious days being bored, stressed, exhausted and unfulfilled. At least while you were failing, you spent your days doing what you love. As the saying goes Monkey see, Monkey do. But there is a major difference between people and monkeys. To get a  monkey to stop doing what he loves like eating banana's and swinging from trees, you must force him or at least offer a better alternative. I guess we're not quite as smart. We can be convinced that the better alternatives aren't attainable. So we work too much for the man at the top of the tree who has all the bananas, smiling when he rewards us and tosses down a few, then talking about what an apeshit he is as soon as he turns his back. But really.... who's the monkey here?
