It’s time to get a watch.
Time, what a crazy thing. I started off the year feeling like I had too much of it, being a newly registered music therapist without any real job security searching for my place in my local community with only time on my hands to make it happen. There was no road map, just what felt like a chaotic guessing game of what ‘making a living as a music therapist’ looks like. I knew two things for certain, first: I wanted community to be at the heart of whatever work I was looking to be involved with. Secondly: I wanted to further my ally-ship to the disability community in my work. Educating myself and uplifting the voices and aspirations of minority groups continues to be an important commitment of mine and a privilege of having been trained to use the uniquely accessible vehicle of music to support the enablement of marginalised people.
Time allowed me to create this website, time allowed me to develop the ability to better understand key issues in the disability community. Time allowed me to connect with organisations in the Te Matau-a-Māui community that support wellbeing. Time allowed me to apply for a community impact grant from Creative New Zealand to develop an inclusive community band mentorship programme at one of Napier’s most popular music venues. Time offered me a part-time role as a music therapist at the Raukatauri Music Therapy regional Centre in Heretaunga (Hastings). Time led to more blog posts, participants seeking my services and finding out the naively ambitious grant application i’d applied for was a success….
Important to note, I am human. The dizziness of freedom (anxiety) also led me to spend a lot of time overwhelmed with worry, doubt, fear and coping by engaging in pseudo-self care (as Ami Kunimara would call it) like doom scrolling, neglecting my own music practice and creativity :( , binge watching tv and going to bed at an ever increasingly late hour.
Here we are though, six or seven months on from the beginning of the year, I now find myself with 30+ hours of time each week running a fully funded community music programme and having consistent music therapy work as both a freelance music therapist and a part-time employed music therapist. I now have a suitcase full of exciting instruments and I regularly leave my driveway with a car boot full of band gear ready for the next jam session.
I am now experiencing a philosophical whiplash of sorts as I catch up to myself and the significant way time plus my two general aspirations (community and disability ally-ship) have transformed my life in a short period.
Before, time expected nothing in particular of me. Now, time is sensitive, fuelled by expectations, to do lists, roadmaps of policies and procedures to follow, calendar notifications and trying to stick to the allocated window of time for a music therapy session. The chaos of infinite time has now found a form, a finite scaffold I (mostly) happily exist within. The security of having consistent work that I enjoy so deeply is layered with the responsibility of making sure I’m doing everything ‘good enough’, including carving out time for my own creativity. I am in a very reflective mood about this process, how structures appear around us as we steer in the direction of our values. This, combined with our necessary entanglement with people, workplaces, communities and the socially constructed pressure to be busy are beginning to make me wonder, is this what it’s meant to be like?
I’m reminded as I write of the book ‘On connection’ by Kae Tempest (they/them), in which they discuss Carl Jung’s (the parent of humanistic psychotherapy) idea that we are governed by two spirits: 1) the spirit of the times and 2) the spirit of the depths
“The spirit of the times is the part of you that is preoccupied with ordering your life into a narrative that you can stomach...the part of you that cares about respectability or the approval of you peers”
“The spirit of the depths is the ancient part of you. The part that responds to the invisible world.....it is drawn to nature and wilderness. The spirit of the depths is not satisfied when you obtain the things the spirit of the times told you that you needed in order to live a satisfying life.”
Jung and Tempest recognise the cultural pressures of the modern world that have turned their back on the spirit of the depths and in doing so have sacrificed our souls, our deeper nature that speaks through poetry, music, fiction, image and myth.
I find myself sucked into the spirit of the times while i’ve been trying to establish myself as a music therapist. As things have settled in my working life, I can finally breathe and reflect on the fact, It’s time to recalibrate, to regain the balance of these two spirits.
I’ve always been a firm believer that to be a music therapist I have to want for myself what I wish for the musicians I work with and that is for them too to achieve their own sense of balance. Addressing the spirit of the depths begins with connection and creativity and honestly i’m finding it a bit tough. To spend time alone being creative feels somedays near impossible when there’s always something ‘more important’ and ‘productive’ i could be doing instead. I’m trying to ease into it and work around this toughness by joining creative groups, like a local choir, and working towards things with my indie band where we play all our original songs. Slowly i’m also trying to do regular stream of consciousness writing as a tool i found through reading ‘the artists way’ by Julia Cameron, that helps working through what creative blockages.
All of this to say…I got a watch.
Music when i’m really in it, transports me to a place without time. In music therapy sessions, one song might feel like it just started but when it reaches its natural end, it’s almost time to sing goodbye. At work I was finding this phenomenon hard to manage alongside the expectation of keeping sessions within a 30 minute or 45 minute slot. So, I got a watch to better manage myself. I think the use of a watch within some music therapy sessions offers a useful example of how the spirit of the times and spirit of the depths can co-exist in balance.
A music therapy session framed by time (my watch) provides the structure that allows the spirit of the depths to be explored. Connection and creativity are an aspiration of every music therapy session I support, where musical improvisation, musicking and creativity are freely explored and celebrated. Leading us both (musician and music therapist) on a journey to ‘see the soul’ (as Kae Tempest might call it) which can be both inherently nurturing and terrifying as we come face to face with the dreams, visions and symbols that represent what can’t be articulated in words. My watch, like some time machine calls us safely back after 30 minutes or so to return to a world that is concrete, that cares about achieving the necessary pursuits of the day.
I will continue to explore this balance as i navigate my music therapy sessions and for myself. It will be interesting to take note of what it feels like to be out of balance, as it is for me right now, and how my attitude and approach to work shifts as i take the important time and space to nurture my own creativity.
