Commitment: How I Chose Philosophy Over a Philharmonic

I wanted to write an essay about commitment, or should I say I do want to write an essay about commitment? The phrases “I do” and “I wanted” can mean almost the same thing or not the same thing at all. Maybe I wanted to and still do. Maybe I wanted to, then I didn’t, and now I do again. The thing about these words, and what one could suppose is the case with all words, is that they’re just words. They can be said over and over again and don’t have to mean any more or less than the time before.

Joseph is committed to his faith, Janice is committed to her job, and I’m committed to my corgi. If you were to ask any person what they mean when they say they’re committed only to contest what they say they truly mean, you would more or less find yourself knee-deep in what might only be described as an unproductive and miserably semantic argument. So in a world where words only have a handful of definitions and there is also infinite context, how much do we mean any of what we say?

No person could possibly be as committed to their dog as they are to their job, am I right? Worse, imagine if that sentence read: “no one could possibly be as committed to their dog as I am to my job.” Now, regarding the same word, there are a mountain of value judgements to sift through. My, how we’ve encountered such unsteady water already!

I toiled over the ways in which I could articulate an explanation of commitment. I considered talking to a priest. They’re undoubtedly committed. I thought to talk to a psychologist. They must know what happens inside of our brains when we commit to things or ideas. But after a long conversation with Father Braddock, a priest from Minnesota whom I met in Washington Square Park completely by chance and several failed attempts to get in touch with a psychologist, I realized that an explanation of the word commitment resonant enough that I could articulate it and simple enough that it could mean the same thing for everyone might be closer to home than I thought.

I was on the phone with my mother for what should have been, in a perfect world, one of our quick weekly chats. These weekly chats are in actuality almost monthly chats that regularly devolve into lengthy conversations about why at ages 24 and 54, respectively, life is still a complete fucking mystery. I love discussing those sorts of things, mysteries of the universe, with my mom. A lot of kids growing up had parents that shied away from complicated, maybe even pointless discussions. My mother? Not a chance. We’ll be riding in the car together, and with her thumbs still wrapped around the steering wheel, she’ll lift up her eight remaining fingers and say something to the effect of, how crazy is it that we have 10 fingers and 10 toes?

I laid out my problem for her, explaining how a rationalization of the idea of commitment was eluding me and it was making the essay difficult to write. The notion of including myself in the essay was pretty far from my mind, so when she suggested that I consider why I wanted to write it and use that as a catalyst for the rationalization I was naturally reluctant. Still, in that moment, it came to mind that this wasn’t the first time someone had suggested the idea to me. As my classmates and I sat down in the weeks before teasing out our ideas for essays the question arose again and again. It was time to examine why I cared enough about the idea to have basically stuck with it for weeks even as the opportunity to change course had presented itself. My commitment to writing an essay about commitment was unwavering, though my ideas about regarding the how of it were anything but.

You’re presented with choices every day. Every choice is fundamentally about who you want to be. You choose who you want to be every day. Simple enough no? So, it remains something of a quandary that I often feel as if I have no say in the matter of my being in the world. In fact, the whole matter of being in the world really transcends feeling in many respects.

Feeling the feels is easy, but conditions don’t always make them these super actionable things, and that complicates them a lot. How do I commit when I don’t even feel like I’m choosing?

Since the day I decided it was something I wanted to pursue I’ve always adored playing music, and in the years since I’ve become certain that it is the only thing I’m truly a natural at. When I was younger my father had tried time and time again to teach me his instrument of choice, the bass guitar. Lesson after lesson, for years, he tried to mold my pre-pubescent fingers into conduits for the expression of musical ideas. Still it never took.

Looking back on it now, it’s clear that learning music is something I was going to have to want at my core. Coming from this realization, how any parent manages to convince their otherwise uninterested child to practice the piano for an hour a day is still a relative mystery to me. I even have a handful of cousins who have become rather accomplished pianists simply because their parents insisted it was good for them. All I ever end up thinking is: good for them, but that’d never work if I tried it.

Frankly, the ten-year-old version of myself was far too obsessed with learning how to ollie on his skateboard and cartoons to even entertain something as nuanced and challenging as mastering a musical instrument. But around the age of thirteen I began the frantic, and though I didn’t know it at the time, lifelong quest to acquire talents that would aid me in attracting members the opposite sex. Music, much like skateboarding, was fun, cool, and something girls seemed to like. If I had a whole week, at the time, my very boyish mind wouldn’t have been able to fathom higher calling.

After only a short time my vapid rationale began melting away like bouillon steeped in boiling water. What was once a hollow pursuit became an obsession. One day it was just me putzing around with a song I liked. A few months later I wanted to learn scales, modes, and the history of music. In a few years I’d have my face buried in complex pieces of sheet music, my eyes running sprints and marathons across the paper.

I woke up early and stayed up late to practice. I slept with my bass guitar next to my bed. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night with an insatiable desire to hear myself play. On those nights, in the dark, my pink sore fingers would pluck away at the metal strings, mulling over the same patterns again and again and again. When I look back at this time in my life I remember the words of one my favorite musicians, thinkers, writers, radio show hosts, actors, deities, sentient beings, juxtapositions of organic matter; Henry Rollins: “I have no talent,” he said. “I have tenacity.”

I too had no talent at the time, but I had a burning desire and that was enough to hold me. Music consumed the next few years of my life. I leapt at the opportunity to get lessons, learn another instrument, or play in any kind of group. A world in which I wasn’t going to make my living playing music didn’t exist. For years I sharpened my musical sensibilities waiting for the day I’d be shipped of to music school. By 18 I’d garnered a talent for the upright bass. My instructor at the time Lainie Hughes, had prompted me to audition for county wide orchestra. I’d show up play a piece and get a chair. A few of her other students and myself drove to an audition where we were greeted by other instructors and their spawn. I took the stage for my audition and ended up getting the fourth chair. It wasn’t the first that I was used to, but at least it wasn’t sixth or something god awful like eighth .

It was here that I would reach a turning point. A boy named Lance, whose last name eludes me, got the first chair. We broke of into sections and he took it upon himself to make sure no one was slacking. The whole day was spent with him over my shoulder armed with a criticism. “Keep your bow arm straight!” he would say. “Legato, legato!”, he would shout over the music only adding to the transiently cacophonous nausea that’s players who’re at their absolute best decent armatures learning new music.

When the tension was high he made sure to remind us that he had been trained by *insert name of accomplished bassist no one knows about* for *insert arbitrary, but extremely long amount of time, that I do not remember.* This was his reasoning for being an ass. I had never wanted to verbally maim someone so badly in my short life. The competitive and hierarchical nature of it felt forced, totalitarian, and void of joy. I knew music school wasn’t going to be too unlike this. There would be some asshole, professor or peer, killing the vibe, and in that moment I was just so against it. Drained and unhappy by the end of the day- on the car ride home I decided I didn’t want to study music in college anymore. How-in just 10 hours or so- does one figure out how to hate the only thing that had been steering their life in any discernible direction whatsoever? I never wanted to compete or be underneath anyone’s thumb as a musician again.

In the Fall of 2011, I went on to study philosophy and political science as an undergraduate at West Chester University and never looked back. There seemed to be less competing in the world of ideas. Don’t get me wrong, it was still academia. People still competed for grant money, still got into endless debates regarding the cogency each others arguments, and there were a few assholes. But three years later- sitting in front of Dr. Joan Woolfrey, during my final ethics seminar, I realized that in all the hours I’d spent inside of philosophy classrooms I hadn’t considered my class once. There had been ideological disagreements for sure, the occasional shouting match even, but no one was ever trying to act like they really knew more or were better than anyone else.

In a a lot of ways discussing, the huge, proverbial, waxing poetics of “what’s real, and why I think it” is a really stressful activity, especially in philosophy where you’re goal is to be as logical as possible. Imagine making some argument you felt was lock tight, and having it picked apart by some peer who’s only leg up was that they managed to consider something you didn’t. There’s no shame in that really, it’s why we’re different, so that others see things you don’t, but it still stings because in a weird way you gave yourself to that idea; you found certainty in logic and just called it a day. Once you committed you seemed to have stopped thinking. Still, when I think of commitment in philosophy, the first thing I ultimately end up thinking is that it doesn’t exist; the stakes in logic are just too fucking low.

You realize soon enough that one can use logic to say anything, and the strength of your logic (and subsequently how ridiculous you were gonna look for committing to it) it’s really about the degree of difficulty a person has refuting what you say. Logic as the support for even the most ridiculous notions is still logic and there was something to it being low stakes, about it being able to be anything, that made each of your logical blunders easier to deal with and less meaningful. As I felt my mind warped by this new way of thinking, I could sense the muscles in my hands becoming weaker, the callouses on my finger tips getting soft, and those neural pathways connecting the sheet music to my eyes then to my brain and from my brain to my hands begin to deteriorate. It was oddly heartbreaking, but I let it happen, it was done.

I hit my physical peak as a musician when I was only 20. To this day that still saddens me. I could have been better. It could have been great. I mean, my love was great, still is in a lot of ways. The reason commitment as a concept had such great appeal was because I know what it is to have made a huge one; only to abandon it for a new and more elusive one.

It hurts more when I think of how I walked away from it on kind of a whim. One day I was committed and one day I wasn’t. I felt weak, bratty, and entitled. To think of how my father fell out of playing seriously, only amplifies those feelings.

As a young man growing up in Jamaica reggae music was in his blood. It was and is rebellious music, hedonistic music. To this day, still, few words describe my father better than rebel. He always does things the way that he wants to do them. Not in an egotistical way, but in the way that only a person who knows what they’re doing can do. Some of my fondest memories of him come in the form of anecdotes about his early years as a musician, playing a group called Sonic Salvation. I still give him shit for the band name, but it was the late 1970’s, what should I have expected? Still, when he talks about the music I know it’s where his heart was. Growing up I remember hearing him sing, always singing my dad. In the shower chanting his favorite Third World lyrics. “It was 96 degrees in the shade! Know where I’m coming from?” he would yelp. I still have no clue what that song is about, but when he sings it I know his passion is real.

It hurt to think about in relation to myself sometimes. See, my dad’s father died when he was really young and his mother died when he was around the same age I was when I decided to not go to music school. Only difference was, my father was on his own and I wasn’t. The need to feed himself meant putting certain aspirations on hold. 15 or so years down the line he had been married to my mother for a few years and was preparing for his newest venture, fatherhood. He was making a living in Montgomery County Pennsylvania fixing office equipment for Xerox. He would drive all up down the tri-state area fixing machines. Fixing machines just like music stimulated his mind. The workings of a circuit board intrigued him. Squatting, examining the intricacies of machines, improvising solutions gave him life. Still, he often considered if he could do it forever. “What was gonna happen when I was to old to drive for hours, lugging around a huge tool box, and squatting down to fix fax machines?” he said.

Working on a machine somewhere in the Alabama between Philadelphia and Pittsburg he met a man bound to a wheelchair who worked as a software engineer. The man explained to him that it was among the only viable occupations that can be done without legs. My father had found the answer to his question and spent the next few years years teaching himself how to write code. With no college degree and a willingness to be flexible he had found a new calling. When he told me this, for whatever reason I wasn’t, feeling as bad about quitting music school.

Now that I think about it, maybe that’s one of the things that kept my parents together. It’s not as if they’d ever hated each other, but they both knew about disappointment, about walking away when you might not have been ready to and that’s powerful.

See, my mother had dreamt of flying planes her whole life. She even lived away from my father for a year while she was going to flight school in Ottawa, Canada. As a young lanky girl walking home from school in Kingston Jamaica she would pass the same airfield and admired the pilots, their chins, their uniforms, their occupation.

Since that age, she’d known she had vertigo. Some mornings she would sit up to fast and be sick for the rest of the day. The whole world would spin, fading in and out of focus for hours at a time, but by 1984 she already had her pilots license. Flying planes requires “an innumerable amount of certifications” she says. “you want to fly for more than two hours, certification. You want to fly at night, certification.” There were so many certifications one needed to get that to this day she has trouble keeping them all in her head. Scheduled to test for yet another one, she’d lept out of bed in the morning and knew she wouldn’t be able to fly that day.

She saw a doctor, who for the first time in her life, diagnosed her with vertigo. It was all over at that point. No matter what she did no doctor would clear her to fly. My mothers’ lifelong dream of being a pilot crumbled in front of her before she was even 30 years old. Different strokes, she didn’t stumble into an uber stimulating career right afterword like my father had. She got a degree in electrical engineering and she hated it. By that point she already had two kids, so going back to school seemed pretty out of the question. That didn’t seem to detour her for too long though.

I remember long nights as a seven-year-old sitting crosslegged with a coloring book in classrooms next to her while she took exams next to students half her age. Still, that business degree landed her jobs in Human Resources and career development, a field she loves.

“ I went to school as a late twenty-something for the wrong thing after having my whole world undone in matter of minutes, when I was barley an adult. Then I went again as a thirty-something with two kids,” she said. “Somehow I think that makes me uniquely qualified to help people figure out how to not hate their lives, how to help people plot a new course for themselves”

When she told me this story, again, just like when my father explained his career change I didn’t feel so bad about no going to music school.

I read a study in Forbes Magazine that said 63% of the worlds workers are “not engaged” in their work and that 24% are “actively disengaged.” This is a really nice way of saying most people aren’t happy with what they do for a living. I wonder how flexible they were in their thinking? Maybe they needlessly committed? Or maybe they just weren’t lucky like my parents.

That nature of commitment is quite counterintuitive. It’s rooted in flexibility, a willingness to entertain multiple narratives, multiple ways of thinking, and multiple paths. Commitment is knowing you’ll probably have to adjust and that the adjustment might hurt; a lot. Giving in to the likelihood of adjustment is actually the thing that rationalizes commitment. Adjusting my reporting plan for this essay hurt in a few ways and giving up on music school hurt in a few different ones.

Real commitment, the things that you’ll stick with forever, more often than not stem from a series of weird, polarizing, almost existentially unintelligible shifts. So, Joseph is committed to his faith, Janice is committed to her job, and I’m committed to my corgi. It all makes sense, it all reads the same even when it doesn’t seem like it, it’s all subject to change and understanding of what’s possible.