Confident, and still a nervous wreck

No question in it. Just the evening, told honestly: the sweat, the dim light, a mother’s good idea, and the moment the music came back.

If you have practiced something for years and still shaken when it counted, this is for you.

Confidence, or calm?

“Something i thought i’d built a lot of confidence in.” The word doing the quiet damage there is thought. One nervous night, and years of building start to look as if they might not have been real.

But confidence and calm are two different things, and it is easy to treat them as one. Calm is how it feels to walk in. Confidence is what is there to stand on once you are playing. A person can lose the first completely and still have every bit of the second.

The night itself shows which one went missing. The calm was gone: the nerves, the sweat, the words “nervous wreck.” The confidence was not gone. It was waiting, and somewhere in the middle of the set, it showed up.

The nerves, or the hands?

“I got my groove on and allowed years of experience take over.”

Years of experience do not live in the part of you that narrates. They live in the hands, the timing, the feel for where the next beat goes. That kind of knowledge rarely announces itself. It does not argue with nerves, and it does not reassure anyone in the minutes before a set. It plays, once it is allowed to.

Allowed is the right word. Nothing in the post says the nerves were beaten. They simply stopped being the ones in charge of the music.

A black outfit

There is a small kindness in the middle of this story. The momma’s suggestion was practical: a black outfit. Whether or not she meant it this way, it made room for the nerves without treating them as a verdict. The sweat could happen, and the music could still happen.

Both did.

From the book

In your work as an engineer, when you are presented with a problem you have a structured process for thinking about and solving a problem that you repeat over and over again to achieve results. You may not talk about it, but it is there, and it is part of your intellectual process.

In context: after church one Sunday in Beijing, a man who worked as an engineer for a German car maker told Levi, a professor, that he must be smarter than him. Levi disagreed. The only difference, he said, was that he could talk about what he did, “whereas in your profession you use a lot of unarticulated knowledge to perform your work.”

A musician stands where that engineer stood. Years of playing are mostly unarticulated. On a night when the voice in your head is mostly panic, it can seem as if nothing else is there, because the deepest thing you know does not speak in words. It is there anyway, and it was there in that club.