The Most Powerful Person in the World

Part VIII in the Blog-A-Week Series

When I look back at some of the things I've done, I feel like the most powerful person in the world. Not because the things I've done have been so huge or magnificent, but because I did the thing/got the thing/had the thing happen that I wanted. It's like that old Disney adage: if you can dream it, you can do it. Now, before I start blathering on about this, let me take a moment to say that NONE of these things I'm referring towere things I did alone. I had someone's helping hand somewhere, even if all he or she did was stay out of the way. It's more likely, however, that these things were accomplished with the conscious help of many friends and loved ones, and of course, Joe Campbells "thousand unseen helping hands."

On Thursday, I did a couple of guest appearances at A Place Called Home (APCH), an afterschool program for kids in South Central. One of my former students works there teaching music, and over the summer, we hatched a plan for me to go and talk to his kids. So yesterday I went and I spoke to a group of middle schoolers and a group of elementary schoolers. All of it went well. I told them about being a singer, about my background, and I showed them clips of me and other singers, and sang for them. Also, I answered a million questions. It was weird being in front of middle schoolers again. It brought back memories, good and bad. The kids at APCH were mostly well-behaved and engaged, and even the troublemakers could be dealt with easily. It was a positive experience on the whole. Afterwards, I was talking to M about teaching middle school and about how difficult I found it. He agreed that it was one of the hardest jobs ever (take that, Deadliest Catch folks!). M then asked about the series of circumstances that brought me from a middle school in Brooklyn, to Los Angeles, through one of the most well-respected musicology programs in the country, and into a full-time job at LACC. And truly, at that moment, I couldn't really call up the many millions of machinations that made all of it possible. What I thought to myself was, 'I wanted these things, and they happened.'

But it sure as hell wasn't magic, because it was a lot of hard work. It was studying in the bathtub when J and I lived in the studio, buying a car just so I could get from one job to another, spending literally thousands of hours in the library, agonizing over words in the dissertation, spending thousands of dollars to go to conferences to give papers and get feedback. But none of that stuff matters in the big picture because it all went towards the completion of the goal. I set out to do something and it got done. It took five years of work and sacrifice (and tens of thousands of dollars), but it got done. That's a powerful feeling. The feeling that you can want something and that you can get it.

And it hasn't just been the Ph.D. and the job; there have even been people that I really wanted to get to know, and now I can call them my friends. Sometimes I feel like I can do anything I set my mind to. Those are good days.

But here's the thing, I don't really know what I want so my power isn't much use to me at the moment. But that's all right. Not knowing what you want isn't so bad either. Chaos has is own charm. Perhaps right now, chaos is the work of those thousand unseen helping hands leading me to the next thing.