The other day I was getting off the train in Back Bay, and I felt a little guilty.

I looked around at my fellow commuters with furrowed brows, sighing deep breaths to build their courage to face the day. Spreadsheets were involved, I’m sure.

(I stare at people in the city all the time. That’s the terrific skill you can build growing up in the country where folks eyeball each other all the time.

City folk don’t have the resources — as Barbara Kingsolver described in her novel Demon Copperhead, “you have to save your juice.” —

So that leaves me, Mr. Eye Contact on Main Street free to people study. I’m also super nosy, so I can’t help it.)

But I felt that little guilt twinge disembarking the double deckah; as I walked down the platform and up the station stairs, I was like, “How’d I get so lucky that my job is listening to folks sing in a building full of recently tuned Steinways?”

If you’d told 12-year-old Dan in Mrs. Smith’s music trailer classroom that was going to be his job one day, he’d have squealed and cut a cartwheel right there.

Last Friday, I was chatting with a collaborative pianist during a classroom change.

“Good semester start?”

“Yeah, great,” she said in her terrific Polish dialect.

“I know, I said — I was thinking today how I get to work in a building full of pianos!”

She agreed. “If you’d told me as a little girl in Poland I’d be here one day, I never would have believed you.”

And I grand jetéed out of the recital hall in celebration of a week getting to do this crazy job where I sigh, yell, screlt, shout, and mimic dramatic mezzo sopranos like it’s normal all while assuming various ego identities.

It’s silly.

I also listened to an interview with Arthur Brooks and Oprah at Harvard Business School on the YouTubes. (I do recommend Brooks’s article series in The Atlantic.)

Oprah talked about how helpful it is to review all the “you never knew you were gonna’s.”

I agree.

12-year-old me never thought I’d teach at a conservatory surrounded by folks who blow my mind. 

16-year-old me didn’t know sitting in the balcony of the Majestic Theatre in 1994 that in 8 years I’d be playing a role in that same show out on the road. 

And confused, anxious, wounded me through a big chunk of my life didn’t know that guardian angels, true friends, and loving mentors would help me heal and integrate enough to share (very imperfectly) some of the ways that helped me — mostly through singing.

(Confusion, anxiety, and wounds are still a part of me; they’re just not all of me. They also tell me to slow down, breathe, pray for help, and allow some compassion to me and from me.)

I’d love you to review a few times in your life when that version of you had no idea that later you would get to do something terrific.

And the same is true for right-now you.

We have no idea what splendid things we’re going to grow into.

There’ll be all the usual obstacles and snares, scrapes and snot, but I believe you’ve got the tools.

Know how I know? You’re reading this now. You made it.

What’s that terrific quote? You have a 100% success rate of making it through hard days.

Well done.

And here’s to what’s ahead — something beautiful you don’t even know about yet and wouldn’t believe if future you materialized and told you about it.

May you, one day soon, have to manage guilty feelings on a commuter train as you suppress the urge to skip.

And remember — there’s only one you. Folks need to hear the story only you can sing.

Love much,

Dan

PS This sweet child on the Instagrams trying to pet a bear cub exhibits my early dialect perfectly. I talked exactly this way (and it might be what my internal voice still sounds like :)) 

PPS Here’s the interview with Arthur Brooks and Oprah at Harvard Business School.