On any given day I am walking around with one of the greatest pieces of music ever written playing in my head–Bach, Brahms, that sort of thing–and I suppose that this is a certain kind of wealth. I don’t deny it. It is surely a blessing to carry with me a sonic imprint of entire symphonies, string quartets, and piano sonatas that whisper privately to my innermost ear as I go about my business. Cleverly, I don’t need headphones. I don’t even need to press play.
But even as my heart swells with the memory of an impassioned flute solo or the timbre of a multi-million-dollar string section, my body braces for impact. On some deep level, it thinks that I am the one playing the music, and I want to do a good job. Inspirational speeches notwithstanding, doing a good job in classical music means not making mistakes, and making a mistake does not mean hitting a wrong note so much as it means hitting the right note but slightly out of tune, or with an unrefined tone quality, or at a volume that is in poor taste, or with too sharp or too mushy an articulation, or without proper musical direction. This is perhaps not what doing a good job should mean, or what anyone wants it to mean, but this is what it means when humans are not vibrating at their highest frequency, so to speak, which seems to be quite often. As you can imagine, doing a good job is, in practical terms, impossible.
The flip side of this blessing, then, is the curse of subconsciously and involuntarily wanting to do a good job at a job I’m not even doing at the moment. (My impression is that I have only recently become aware of this absurdity, but there’s a chance I knew it at one time and then forgot. I may forget again, but at least this time there will be a written record of having known.) For me, it’s not just an ear worm. It’s a gauntlet.
To be perfectly honest, though, I don’t just want to do a good job playing the octave leaps in Brahms’ second symphony. I want to do a good job at life. I want to do a good job as a person. I want to do a good job managing my time, managing my finances, taking care of my health, developing my talents, being a citizen and community member and family member and contributing member of society. I want to do a good job thinking about this topic. I want to do a good job writing this post.
How did this become my unspoken motto? Doing a good job seems like kind of a lame reason for being, and it’s pretty shallow, as moral imperatives go. I would much rather get out of bed in the morning fired up to create beauty, to seek truth, to connect with other living beings and the universe at large, to respond with my whole heart to this life.
Doing a good job, however, is not lame in itself. Personally, I do not want to live in a world where no one cares about doing a good job. When other people do a good job building a bridge, or performing onstage, or hosting a party, or putting together an outfit, or crafting a sentence, or preparing a meal, or cleaning a bathroom, or planning an event, or tending a garden, or piloting an airplane, or fixing my car, or raising their children, or telling a story, or designing a traffic pattern, it makes my life better. I am in favor of doing a good job. I am pro-good-job-doing.
The problem, I think, is when the desire to do a good job seeps down into the unconscious mind and transforms into a ruthless compulsion rather than a freewill offering given in the service of a higher purpose, even if that higher purpose if just to have a bit of fun. Doing a good job for the sake of doing a good job may be admirable and much appreciated in our society, but it is also absurd. It simply cannot be why we are here on this planet.
Don’t ask me why we are here, but I know it’s not that.
