Me and Amy Zhang ‘24 after the Boston Symphony concert
There are two more weeks left until Thanksgiving Break. That also means that every one of my professors is trying to shove every assessment right before Thanksgiving – which is just lovely. I know Thanksgiving will feel a lot better with all those papers out of the way. But the problem is that those papers are not out of the way right now. And course registration for sophomores is tomorrow, so that’s splendid.
It’ll be fine! Right?
Let me just dwell on a fun Saturday evening spent at Target with friends and music. Sometimes, recalling happy times make me feel like things are going to be okay. 🙂
This past Saturday afternoon, my roommate Amy Xuan and I went to Target to look for supplies: pads, lotion, sticky notes, candy – the usual. We dawdled around the nail polish section trying to decide between aggressively pink sparkly nail polish or pitch black gloss. Amy ended up getting the black nail polish, painting her nails right that evening and showing them off to me with a huge grin.
After grabbing a quick dinner, I took the shuttle with a friend from ECON103 to see the Boston Symphony. We saw Beatrice Rana, an Italian pianist, play Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Minor Opus 23 conducted by Russian conductor Dima Slobodeniouk. It was beautiful! The way Rana played made the notes sound like they were shimmering – I don’t know how else to describe it. After the Piano Concerto, we heard the symphony play Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D Minor Opus 70 conducted by the same conductor. In the first movement, Slobodeniouk flicked his wrist and suddenly his baton snapped and flew out of his hand. The audience gasped a bit, but then we all held our breath in amazement as we watched him continue conducting with both hands, baton-less and unbothered, for the entire symphony. He looked like he was dancing with the music, and if you just watch the conductor for the entire performance, you can see where he wants the music to build, where he wants a section to play softly, and where he wants everyone to go wild. Conducting is mesmerizing – it’s like another language. Watching him conduct made me want to join an orchestra again and take Wellesley’s MUS308 class on conducting.
Boston Symphony Hall, 10 minutes before last Saturday’s concert
There was a 20-something year old person sitting next to me who apparently went to Harvard for undergrad and is currently pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at MIT. I won’t say his name because 1. Ethical reasons and 2. I forgot it. He also said that he comes to the symphony every week, so much so that his friends jokingly ask him if he’s doing a PhD in music or neuroscience. That made me think a little. I’ve been worrying about having to give up music entirely at some point in my life.
We can all think of people we know who are insanely good at their fields of study. Think of that one prodigious computer science classmate who just gets it, or that one math student who skips every class, shows up for the exams, and aces them every time. Those people have also decided to give up many other paths in order to devote all of their time to honing their “craft.” I’m a political science major (recently declared!), but I definitely have not been giving my all to political science. I feel like I’ve been stretching myself thin over several interests – I mean, I’m having a lot of fun in my NEUR100 class, and I devote far more hours than probably necessary to my chamber music group. If I took all that time I dilly-dallied away on my other interests and funneled it all into political science, I wonder if I would be farther along my “career path” than I am now.
I’m not particularly devoted to music, nor do I possess a morsel of talent in playing my instrument, but playing in the Wellesley Chamber Music Society is really what keeps me going through each week. Being able to go to a practice room and play violin for an hour every other day grounds me. Going to chamber coaching and laughing about the pains of intonation (or the lack thereof) is what I look forward to every weekend. But now, knowing how this MIT neuroscience PhD student still finds time to practice piano and come to the Boston Symphony every weekend, perhaps I should instead try to find the best balance between the things I must do and the things I enjoy doing – and hopefully I can enjoy doing the things I must do too.
Maybe it is just like writing a paper. You could devote 1000% of your time and effort into a paper, toil away for every hour of every day you have free, and receive a well-deserved A. Or, you could put in 70% of your effort to get a B+. But, in exchange, you have much more time to spend with your friends, to try learning something new, to play music, or to just have some fun. Finding that balance must be easier said than done, but now that I know it’s possible, I think I will give a more balanced life an honest shot. 🙂