Clarity for Teachers: Day 15
‘Profit and respect won’t make you clearer. Don’t pursue them.’
When I was eighteen and the long summer of freedom that followed A-levels was over, I set off with an over-full rucksack and an old guitar. In those days, you could take the boat from Newcastle to Bergen, and over the next ten months I wound my way from Norway around to Turkey and back again, making a living by singing in the street for money.
I’d started busking locally a couple of years earlier. My best friend and I had become a semi-regular feature in the town centre on Saturday afternoons, but now it was no longer just a way to fund my sixth-form social life; it was what I had to rely on, travelling alone, in countries where I didn’t speak the language.
It was an initiation, though a bewildering one, with no framework and no elders. But today’s card takes me back to a lesson I learned that year.
You can’t use your singing voice to make anyone give you money. What you can do is to choose your spot wisely, so that the song reaches people soon enough that they have time to notice, to react, and to reach into their pockets or purses and pull out whatever change comes to hand before they pass you. If they have to slow down and stop, half of them won’t. And then, having chosen your spot, you can sing from the heart.
There are people who will always put a coin in a busker’s hat, as a reflex or out of sympathy, but you won’t make a living off that alone. You have to find whatever it is in the song and in yourself that touches people, that moves them or makes them smile. Do that and, if you take the good days with the bad, the coins will flow steadily enough to see you through — or that was my experience, at least.
What won’t work is if your mind is somewhere else, if you’re frustrated or worried about whether you’ll make enough money for a place to stay that night. Now, I’d saved some money before I went, so I had an emergency fund, and I had parents who would have found a way to bail me out if it came to it; I knew how lucky I was. Still, I had my share of miserable afternoons, and there were longer stretches early on when I didn’t know if I would make this work. Those were the times when the only thing that worked was to let go of the self-pity and the need for money, and lose myself in the singing so that it came alive.
The word ‘profit’ seems to belong to another world to those months as a street musician, but I take the lesson to be the same. And there were towns that were profitable, weeks when I lived high on the generosity of the passers-by. What never worked was to allow myself to pursue the money, to let it set the course of my being — and I’ve never found that to work in anything else, though I’ve sometimes made the mistake of trying.
Västerås, 19 March, 2020
This is the fifteenth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
