Paying Your Dues
How many of us were big picture thinkers born into a small picture world? Growing up, I was always asking, why? Why do anything at all? Now I understand that I needed a fundamental organizing principle for my life, an explicit one, to be practiced, not some vague something out of the corner of my eye that was implicit and unquestioned. As in: you grow up, maybe go to college, get a job, get married, have kids. Why, why, why? Also, we’re dying at some point, right? Why is no one talking about that? That fact must have some bearing on the choices we make in our life?
What I call my “home tradition” is not wise. This home tradition can be called secular humanism: capitalism, individualism, positivism, materialism, denying death. This tradition led me to anxiety, confusion, and depression. The Western philosophers helped to explain the problem but didn’t offer adequate answers and ultimately made my anxiety, confusion, and depression worse. Luckily, I did find an organizing principle, a wisdom tradition to satisfy my fundamental question: why do anything? For me, this was Buddhism. But what first started me on the path to find Buddhism was John Coltrane.
It was in Coltrane’s music that I heard an answer to why. It was the sound and activity of spirit—unable to be quantified but undeniably there. This was a path, a goal, a reason to get up in the morning. Coltrane was pointing to something, even enacting something, that was answering the question I couldn’t put into words but was essentially: there must be more to life than this. Than contemplating what to do or buy this weekend until the weekends run out.
Coltrane studied Buddhism, and Hinduism and Christianity and Islam and Charlie Parker and Lester Young and anything that could give him insight into the questions that he had. He wanted his music to “give a picture to the listener” of “the many wonderful things in the universe” that he knew and sensed. He did give me—and I suppose millions of people at this point—this picture. It was an acknowledgement by a fellow human, very clearly and undeniably communicated, that these “wonderful things” exist and one can put them at the center of one’s life.
Learning the saxophone became the center of my life. And my first lesson was to run smack into the wall of my own profound self-hatred. I would beat myself up so much in practicing that it created a wall separating me from the love I was trying to reach. I had recently read a book on Buddhism that was also resonating with me. Eventually, I called a local Buddhist center asking if they had any instruments I could play as part of a spiritual practice. I was ready to give up even the saxophone in order to make music aka connect with the wonderful things. They said no, but they could help me approach my instrument in that way. Since then, jazz, Buddhism, and a meaningful life have been inextricably linked for me.
Jazz and Buddhism are wisdom traditions to which I probably owe my life. In jazz, I started to understand that there has been a spirit that has been passed along through sound and has offered its wisdom to new generations. I found it in Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders, Ella Fitzgerald, and so many other musicians. What is the debt that I owe to this wisdom tradition of jazz? As a character in James Baldwin’s novel, Another Country, says to a white woman, “You don’t have any experience in paying your dues and it’s going to be rough on you, baby, when the deal goes down. There’s lots of back dues to be collected, and I know damn well you haven’t got a penny saved.”
Next blog post: Paying Dues II
Image by Ben Territt via Flickr Creative Commons License.
