While wrapping up this December issue and collecting photos of 2014 highlights from summer programs for our upcoming January issue, I received a panicked e-mail from a program director. “Burning the candle at both ends and in the middle . . . ,” she wrote, apologizing for nearly missing the deadline. “You, me, and everyone else!” I thought, staring into the abyss of my unread e-mails.
Society seems to be evermore consumed with being busy. We overschedule our own lives and our children’s lives. We measure our worth by the length of our to-do lists and their number of checkmarks. Then we wear our overstuffed schedules as a badge of honor. But what is the real cost of trying to do it all?
In the blog post “The Disease of Being Busy” on the website www.onsite.org, Omid Safi offers some insightful answers to this question. Safi defines this malady as a “dis-ease”—we are all so busy that we are no longer ever at ease. As we become so wrapped up in all that we are doing, there isn’t time left to think, ponder, meditate, or just simply to be. We are, after all, as Safi points out, human beings and not human doings.
Becoming an artist is as much about being as it is about doing. If we focus only on the technical aspects of perfecting the language, singing a perfectly in-tune melismatic passage, or achieving perfect resonance but neglect delving into the meaning, soul, and passion for music making, are we true artists? In striving for perfection, we may omit the humanity—the basis and foundation of true art, especially opera.
Tenor Bryan Hymel, featured in this month’s cover story (p. 24), says that it’s opera’s ability to strip out the noise of the world that will be its saving grace. “I really, in my being, do not think that opera is going to die,” he tells writer Lisa Houston. “What an audience gets, hearing a voice without amplification, it is a unique experience in an overly digital crazy world and existence. If anything, coming back to those acoustic, real, organic-in-the-truest-sense experiences—we need to remind people so they can experience it.”
Opera can remind us of our humanity, through its unamplified sounds, with its tales of love, heartache, triumph, and deceit. It can take us away from the all-consuming technology—purported to simplify our lives, yet often only increasing our ability to be ever busy—and return us back to the basics. It can help us all, whether singing on stage or sitting in the audience, to breathe—an essential element of being, as Claudia Friedlander explains (p. 14).
The biggest cost of being overly busy, according to Safi, is that we neglect those we care about. We lack the time to nurture and enjoy the relationships in our lives, something that Hymel hopes his artistic work can change. “I hope that an audience comes and thinks, ‘Nice voice,’” he says, “but that when they see me enjoying and reminiscing with Mimì, that that reminds them, ‘Don’t let your life slip through your fingers. You are going to lose loved ones. Cherish the moments that you have.’”
There should be no better time to take Hymel’s words to heart than during the holidays. We should be focused on relationships and time together. But the busy hustling and bustling of doing often crowds out any time or space for simply being together.
As this year comes to an end, let’s focus more on being and less on doing. In the process of fighting this “dis-ease,” we can remember our own humanity, strengthen the relationships most important to us, and in turn become the artists we want to be.
