It's Coach Will dropping in to share some quick thoughts on a topic near and dear to my hear: how--and why--to life gets better if you can see it through the lens of an artist (<---I'm hoping you read that with a properly highfallutin accent, like this: "Ahhhrteeest" :).
When I graduated from high school, my brother-in-law sent me a letter that proved to be prophetic.
I had attended an arts boarding school for my senior year, rubbing shoulders with the best and brightest performance artists before they got famous, and was looking ahead to shipping off to conservatory for college.
But in the letter, Dillon (my brother-in-law) outlined a paradox of our modern lives: we all love and appreciate art, but don't live in a society that reflects that appreciation with material support for artists and their work.
It was somewhat disconcerting to read as a young, aspiring musician (about to embark on 4 years of student-debt accumulation…), but it highlighted how important the path I'd chosen really was.
Art, he said, was so important that it still existed even though our society hadn't figured out how to actually pay most artists, at least not to make their art.
His paradox stuck with me, through college and my rocky post-college years, when it became clear that I wasn't very interested in figuring out how to actually make a living playing my trumpet--mostly because being a gigging trumpet player didn't involve much art-making after all.
I turned instead to the fitness biz, where my natural interest in physicality, self-determination, and helping people came together (and paid the bills)
.And it allowed me time to keep playing music, to keep working on my art, and to keep digging on the question Dillon had raised for me: why does art matter, after all?
Oddly, the answer came to me not through music, but through building The Fitness Alchemists.
As Hannah and I combed through the needs of our students--past and present--and investigated how we might use the tools of fitness to help address them, I realized that the struggle of artists is really the struggle that all of us engage with: How do we make our imagination real?
How do we make the things that we imagine? How do we translate dreams into reality? How do we process the pain and wrongs of our past into richer and better futures?
Those questions are as important for the artist as they are for the engineer, the school teacher, and the personal trainer. For all of us, the struggle we face in crafting satisfying lives is in finding the right balance of technique and imagination.
Imagination is the fertile, fecund ground of our minds that fixates on compelling observations and draws creative connections. It is where our dreams about the future come from, and the source of the belief that change is possible.
But that imagination stays bottled-up, private, and formless until we can make it real. Unless we have the technique to translate our ideas into something that we can share with fellow humans, our ideas never get to happen. Technique is the skill that we have with the tools that we have.
What that technique consists of exactly will be different for each of us--just like our imaginations will be highly individual--but our ability to translate imagination into reality often comes down to a simple but unavoidable need for enough technique.
I slowly realized that for all the people we worked with through the Fitness Alchemists, no matter their goals or obstacles, they would be sunk if they couldn't balance the imagination/technique equation for their bodies.
Sometimes they had felt limited--by pain, or time, or cultural norms--that they didn't have any imagination for their physical selves anymore. For these folks, often just finding movement that felt good and resulted in tangible changes to their physical abilities (over time) was enough to light the imaginative fire. A little work on their technique opened the door for their imagination to bloom.
For others, who already had a rich physical imagination, small improvements in their physical tools--their movement technique--unlocked profound shifts in bringing their imagination to life.
But for everyone--me and Hannah included--progress requires the right combination of imagination and technique, in our work lives but also in our physical lives. After all, we are physical beings before we are anything else.
Like artists, we all must engage with the struggle of having ideas (imagination) and making those ideas real (technique), even and especially in the realm of our bodies.
I'm curious...when it comes to your physical life, how do you navigate this equation?
Do you feel limited in your imagination of your physical self?
Or do you struggle with bringing that imagination to life, because you feel limited by your technique?
No matter what your challenge is, the world really needs whatever you have locked inside.
To finding your gold, Coach Will
PS: if you're curious what this equation looks like for me these days, at least when it comes to my actual music-making, I'd love to have you join me on Facebook Live tonight (Saturday) for a balcony jazz concert for our neighbors--and YOU--with my love (and masterful flutist), Debbie. We'll be posting the live on The Fitness Alchemists Facebook page.