That crucial Monday reset

Oh, hi friends!

How do you reset?

I feel like there’s a button that you can push. Maybe you find it after a long weekend; you’re refreshed and click, your brain and enthusiasm and effort is regenerated.

Maybe you find it at the end of a long project. It’s out in the world. Click. Time for something new.

Maybe your reset is lurking at the close of a difficult chapter in your life. You don’t know it’s a reset — it might only look like an ending — but it’s there. Click.

I miss VHS tapes. We used to go to Blockbuster every week to pick out movies. When you were finished watching the movie, of course, you had to rewind. Or rather, got to rewind. A little bit of effort and a minute or two of time, and there you were, back at the beginning again. 

All you had to do was press play.

Click.

Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash

Well, I made a thing! I’m so appreciative for all the support — both in person and digitally — for my short new musical “The Eyes of Vienna,” which had a reading at Lincoln Center on Saturday. (Boy, that's a crazy sentence to write.) We had two short rehearsals last week, and cut 15 minutes from the show the day before (!!!) (guess being an editor for 10 years comes in handy after all), and then buttoned it up and did the thing.

I thought the scariest thing as a creator was to let your work free from the page and live in the real world, but actually the scariest thing is to do that…and then stand on stage immediately afterward and hear it critiqued by six panelists in front of an audience of your colleagues, friends, and strangers. LOLOL. I AM TEFLON?!

But this experience reminded of two things. One is this quote: If you want the things you’ve never had, you have to do the things you’ve never done. And that includes the standing-on-stage.

And the other thing is that the high point wasn’t this: the performance.

The high point was actually this: us doing a final speed through minutes before going onstage, not knowing what this was or how it will go, but putting in the effort anyway. That was pure joy. 

Btw, we recorded the performance. Video coming soon!

“Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?”

Ira Glass on "The Gap" (text here, video here!)

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Thanks, as always, for reading.

Love, Kara