Activity vs. Purpose

I’ve been thinking this week about the difference between activity and purpose. I’m a doer. I like to be busy and working on something, usually a few somethings. I can’t remember the last time I was working on just one thing. I had a job all through school and did ministry on the side in a local church.

If you read last week’s post, you know that I just moved to Wisconsin for Jenna’s grad program. For the first time since I was thirteen, I don’t have any immediate obligations on most days. I have a few students on Mondays at a local music store, but other than that the only things that occupy my time are my whims. I try to stay busy. I’ve been keeping the apartment clean. I’ve hung out with our cat, and we’ve become better friends than I thought I would ever be with a cat. I’ve read a lot. I’ve even caught up on all of the podcasts in my queue (unheard of).

Yesterday I was listening to a podcast. The interviewee talked about how they sometimes confuse “activity” with “purpose,” especially as a way to stay away from uncomfortable feelings.

I glanced at my computer screen and saw:

- A Wikipedia article about Imperial Chinese history

- A music notation file of my instrumental arrangement of “Rocketman” by Elton John, which I am planning to make a video of for my soon to launch Youtube channel (shameless plug)

- The first few guitar tracks of that arrangement in my recording software

- A list of emails I need to respond to

- An empty word processing document that has since become this blog post

In my other browser (I had two open!), I saw several links to jobs with the United States Postal Service.

I was busy, but I was using my activity to distract me from my frustration.

I’ve applied for dozens of jobs that either didn’t pan out or are still in process. Meanwhile, our savings has been slowly depleting. I feel torn between the urgency of getting something and longing for purpose in my work.

I love creating content, building relationships, teaching, mentoring, and learning. I am independent. I haven’t worked for “the Man” for a good five years and I don’t miss it. This kind of work energizes me. It is also hard to find in La Crosse.

I am beginning to feel like I need to take whatever I can get and “hustle.” I am happy to work really hard doing something I hate for less than I’m worth if it means Jenna can become a PA. Such work would be worthwhile, good for our family, and temporary.

But part of me feels left behind, forgotten, and aimless. Engaging that is uncomfortable, so I’d rather not. I’d rather be busy, distracted by activity.

All of this activity hasn’t yielded any substantive fruit, because it hasn’t been intentional or focused. It is hard to know what to focus on, though.

I believe that God is interested in my life, both the big picture and the minutia. The last few weeks have been a mental tug-of-war between waiting for revelation and trying to control my outcome through activity. In the past, my path has always become clear...eventually. I am trying to be patient and purposefully craft my days with that in mind, but it’s been a challenge much of the time.

This tension between activity and purpose applies to music as well. I often tell students and parents the amount of time they practice is not as important as how they practice. I say it’s even possible to practice wrong and be worse off than if you hadn’t practiced at all. As we practice, we rewire our brain, and these pathways become very difficult to overwrite. If you practice with purpose, this is wonderful! But it is counterproductive if you practice incorrectly.

I have a story I often tell to illustrate this point. When I started studying music in college, I had been playing the cello for about nine years. I thought I was pretty good. I was a music major, after all. In my first cello lesson, I had to relearn my bow grip, one of the fundamentals of playing. I spent months overwriting nine years of bad habits. It was tedious and frustrating. For my first recital, I played a foundational piece and was embarrassed I wasn’t performing something more advanced like my peers. My teacher said I shouldn’t be concerned about the difficulty of the music, but rather how I can best play it. He said most people would not know how easy or difficult it was, only how well I played it.

If growth is your objective, musically or otherwise, it will be helpful to slowly, purposefully, refine the right things the right way. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. My job as a teacher is to remind my students of that, and occasionally myself.