I’m a professional french horn player, and a large part of my day-to-day responsibilities is making sure that I keep myself on top of my game, able to play the instrument at the level my job demands. I sometimes find it too easy to let responsibilities like this one turn into drudgery – the tuner drones, metronomes, scales, long tones, breathing exercises, disintegrating etude books I’ve been thumbing through since high school, and on and on and on. Needless to say, none of this is what excited me years ago when I anticipated how my career would look setting out as a ‘serious’ music student, but it’s a vital part of being able to do my job well, especially last year during Corona lockdowns when playing with other people was less of an option. It’s not always a struggle. Most of the time I genuinely like practicing, listening, and studying, but there are times when I take a bit of prodding.
Obviously, freedom to play the horn at a high level requires sacrificing a number of other freedoms. However, rather than thinking of these sacrifices as restrictions, I acknowledge them as part of the life that is set in front of me. Fulfilling, exciting things that should be important to us are always like this. Being a good husband and father means you have to put time and energy into the relationships that make you a husband and father in the first place, but it comes at the expense of many things you will no longer have time for.
We have to be able to give of ourselves in our commitments, whether they’re to career, friends, or family. Too often we fall into the trap of thinking of our time or our energy as our own, or that we have a right to recreation, solitude, or any of the other more myopic consolations implicit in the zeitgeisty ‘self-care’ rhetoric. As Christians, we must acknowledge that our time is a gift from God, and like our bodies and our property, our claim over it is tempered and regulated by our obligations to our neighbor.
But what are we finally to do, when our batteries are drained, our migraine is throbbing, it’s a fast day, and we can’t dig any deeper? G.K. Chesterton posits: “[Children] always say “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.” Through Him, grown-ups can be too.
