One Battle That Ego Lost

“I don’t usually feel my musician’s temperament,” said my sister, L, “but I’m not a happy camper right now.” And with that statement, she offered me the paper in her hand.

My own musician’s temperament began rising too, as I saw that our piano duet was scheduled to be the postlude at her church’s Christmas Eve service. What’s more, someone else was singing the same song that we were planning to play. Neither of us wanted to be childish about a comparatively minor thing, but obviously it wasn’t that minor to us.

A couple of weeks ago, while I was attending a funeral, my sister’s pastor asked me to play at the upcoming Christmas Eve service. I was happy to do so. It is, after all, flattering to be asked. But since L attends this church (she shares the responsibility of playing the organ for services) I thought it was appropriate for her to be involved, so I talked to her and we agreed to play a duet.
I need to digress for a moment. People who start out in life as music majors, or in any type of live performance field, and often in any creative field whether or not it involves live performance, tend to have large egos. It isn’t always the best and easiest quality to live with; even the person with the ego has trouble with it. But how would you manage to go out in front of a few hundred or a few thousand people and risk making a total fool of yourself…without a strong ego?

The problem I have with it, personally, is that in situations that do not involve performance, I still have to deal with an ego that sometimes leads me down the garden path. At times it can be downright embarrassing, and at other times it can be the source of temptation. As it was that evening.

You see, the postlude, being “post”, is at the end of the service, when people are putting on their coats, wishing each other a Merry Christmas, and heading home to bed. (This service lets out around 11:00p.) In other words, they wouldn’t be paying any attention to the music. In fact, usually this service doesn’t even have music going on while the people are leaving.

Unless I’m playing at a reception or some other social situation, I am never happy when people presumably would listen to the music but choose not to. (It doesn’t matter who is playing. Some church ladies whispered once all through our organist’s performance at a church dinner, and I wanted to physically carry them out of the room. It was part of the program after we had eaten, and they should have been listening.) I take music seriously and I want others to respect it. The most obvious way to do that is to listen to it.

My ego, however, had to get involved because I had been specifically invited to play as a sort of guest performer. And my ego did not appreciate being relegated to a spot on the program where the music wouldn’t be heard. How much of my upset was for the sake of the music, and how much was for the sake of my ego, I honestly can’t say. It was probably a mix. It’s likely that the majority of it was ego, even so.

This pastor intended nothing malicious or insensitive. However, he wasn’t in charge of planning the music, and I doubt that he communicated with the lady who was. And my sister and I were trying to determine how we wanted to respond to the situation.

My sister decided to play, be gracious, and take it from there. I agreed with that, but I also planned a polite protest, after a long cooling-off period.

But the more I thought about it, the more dissatisfied I became with my solution.

I’m reading a commentary on the Tao Te Ching right now (Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life, by Wayne Dyer), and one of the points the book makes is that the best thing to do is … nothing. Here is a quote from Verse 48: “When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. True mastery can be gained by letting things go their own way. It cannot be gained by interfering.”

So I was thinking about that the next day while walking after work. There isn’t much to look at when you’re walking back and forth in hallways of an apartment building, so I use the time to think about creative projects or life problems that I need to work out. I asked myself: “Who is this for, anyway, my Source or myself? It should be for my Source.” Using my musical talent expresses something Source has given me, and it is first and foremost done to love and praise Source.

That led to: “OK, when did Jesus ever take action to defend his ego?” The stories we have, as I understand them, paint a picture of a man who clearly knew who he was and was comfortable with that, to the point that he never felt insecure or threatened where his ego lived. Though I no longer subscribe to Christian theology, I still seek to follow Jesus’ example, and that thought simply showed me the thing to do: Let it go, play, and move on.

So I did.

And guess what. A couple of people backed out of the program at the last minute, L and I we were moved up, and our duet didn’t have to be the postlude after all. It was well received, I told my sister’s pastor that I appreciated being asked to play, and the thing slipped harmlessly into the past.

What is the lesson to learn here? Did I, in fact, “change my thoughts and change my life”? Is it possible to conclude that I can affect things like that? If so, I clearly need to learn this lesson and apply it. You wouldn’t believe the life issues I would like to see resolved!