You work a full-time job, and have a spouse and maybe a family. Now you have a hobby (let’s say luthiery) that is steadily taking up your “extra time” and mental space. The next thing you know, your significant other, boss, and friends are concerned about your lack of engagement, and change of routine and priorities. This general scenario has been a common occurrence I’ve experienced in my time as a luthier, and something I hear frequently from other luthiers as well. The “solution”, so to speak, seems to be what we’ve termed in the modern world “work-life balance”.
What does work-life balance mean to you? I’ve come to see work-life balance as really discovering what sparks joy for you and cultivating an overall life that includes that (this doesn’t mean life is always joyful). “Work” is often equated with drudgery. “Life” is often defined as play, hobbies, time off, and other things that nourish us - including time with other people. It is my contention that by seeing things in this black-and-white way, we actually forget that we are the “driver” in our time on this rock. We see things as punitive and rewarding, good and bad, fulfilling and not fulfilling. We see ourselves as at-the-effect of circumstances. We expect things to “make us happy”. We seek that everlasting vacation from the pain of existence. I don’t want to get too philosophical here, but these are the daily realities of our lives, when we really look at it.
Work-life balance or enjoying myself was never even a consideration of mine for a long time. My point of view was influenced by the people around me saying things like, “you get a full-time job, make some money to buy a house, have a family, then retire, and then think about doing something else”. There was no talk of happiness, joy, or hobbies. There was no consideration of anything outside surviving and self-medicating for the suffering surviving seemed to cause. Most of the people expressing these ideas to me weren’t happy by a long-shot, and perhaps had not been introduced to a hobby, or anything they felt excited about. Having habitually worked myself to exhaustion for many years, I realized some kind of balance needed to be reached - at least something was missing or life just didn’t feel good. I wasn’t happy or fulfilled; I was tired and unable to muster enough energy to experience much joy. I was just doing the daily grind without a thought about how it could be different.
Nowadays, my want for work-life balance has led me to a goal of making all of my time “quality time”. I want to give 100% of my attention to whatever I’m doing and be happy, fulfilled, or satisfied about it. Having the experience that you’d rather be somewhere else doing something else is the definition of suffering. I feel like allowing yourself to choose happiness is a major hurdle many of us deal with. Most of us have grown up around people who have not really reached deep inside to seek their own path to joy and happiness - or even realized it was an option. Generations upon generations of just surviving without considering our own happiness has become a plague - leaving us depressed and despondent about our lives. When we feel this way, we seek things to make us happy. We also compartmentalize our life and somehow see our “real life” as separate from our work or our family responsibilities. Everything that is contained in our experience is our life. For me, approaching my life with an attitudinal change of choosing happiness doesn’t mean I’m happy all the time, it means that’s my overarching goal - fulfillment, enjoyment, 100% there in the experience. It runs against my own upbringing and the underlying cultural message of “life is suffering” and “keep your nose to the grindstone”.
Another hurdle to really letting myself live is a cultural idea of art not being taken seriously. “You’re going to be an artist?”. People tend to identify with their job title as if you are only allowed to be one thing in life. The reality is everyone is an artist in some way. To be an artist is to be creative. To be creative is to be human - otherwise we certainly wouldn’t have gotten too far as a species. Look around you - someone had a vision of that couch, that car, that stove. They used their creativity to create something that so many now utilize and possibly enjoy. So, why do we struggle with the idea of being a luthier, an artist, and still being a clerk, a husband, a father, and so on? It has been my experience that struggle about identity is not an inevitable “reality”, it’s really a mindset choice. We are naturally ourselves, and we play different roles. When we overly-identify with one role, we create confusion, and sometimes conflict, between those roles. We even hear this echoed and confirmed from those we love, because they’ve grown up with the same cultural messages: “But you’re a father. You need to spend more time with your kid. You spend too much time in the workshop with those guitars.” Now, there could be a reasonable point here, but not based on roles. Time and money are, indeed, finite resources. We do need to pay attention to where we devote our time and spend our money. These choices do matter. So, we can approach the issue of not spending enough time with our son by assessing where we are spending our time. It’s like the money example of: if you didn’t spend $5 per day on coffee from Starbucks, you could … buy a new bandsaw! So, if our son needs more time and we have devoted 1 hour a day to workshop time, then maybe we can take some time off watching television at night and play a board game with him, for example.
Our shop time, our creative time, needs space too. This is where some professionals recommend that we intentionally devote time to doing our craft. That will look different to everyone. But, it is recommended you do something like: “every Tuesday and Thursday I spend time in the shop from 5-6pm”. You let everyone in your family know about your schedule. You respect that time you’ve put aside and they respect that time. It serves as a contained period in which you get to be creative in your shop. When you do this, you feel more respect for yourself and your family has more respect for you and your craft as well. They feel that they’re important and they know your shop time is also important. This may seem easy. It may not be easy - because it challenges our own, as well as our family’s, internal belief systems about where we should be spending our time or energy. We all have things to say about how each of us operates in our life. By honoring yourself, your creativity, and others, you can eventually create a schedule that supports all things in your life that matter to you.
The High Desert Luthiery Invitational is much more than a guitar show. It is a mindset. It is a way of being. It is a growing and functioning community of like-minded individuals supporting one another. It is an expression of artists and their creativity. It is a safe and thriving place to enjoy music and the craftspeople behind the music.
What is the music of your own life? Is it striking a harmonious chord? What could you do, today, to tune the instrument that is you to become more harmonious with your life? How could you, today, appreciate the inherent harmony of life itself? These questions increase our creativity, as we become more in-line with our lives. This is work-life balance.
