It feels like I’m starting over right about now, in a number of ways. First, I need to recreate my music room destroyed by flood last month. Then there are my recording plans, which also were upended last month, when I realized that the producer and plan for recording I was working towards didn’t feel right at this moment. Finally, there’s the broader context of my leave year from my day job, which is really only just starting and is something I need to figure out how to make the most of. Recreating a physical space for music in my home is a challenge. I can replace the drowned furniture and other things that got destroyed, and work on getting some of the instruments fixed. But I don’t want to do that until I have a clearer plan to keep it from happening again. There are some small-scale actions I can take – finding ways to raise the instruments further off the floor (hanging some from walls, putting the multi-instrument stand on some kind of platform). But I need to explore other ways to keep water from getting into my basement, and we weren’t able to get an appointment with the people who installed our sump pump until December, which is probably about the point at which we can assume any storms will come down as snow rather than as rain and cause fewer flooding problems. I can’t wait until then to create a space were I can comfortably make music. I’m looking into whether there are ways to reconfigure the door (or install a completely different one – the worst case scenario would involve completely sealing up the door, but that isn’t our first choice). I don’t yet know what the intermediate steps are at this point, but I suppose I should at least get started on fixing and raising the instruments (and finding better instrument insurance than I previously had). A psychologically bigger task is re-starting my search for a producer. The person I was originally slated to work with was recommended to me by so many people that I didn’t seriously consider anyone else. And it’s possible that I’m not ready to record right now. That was part of my insight in August: both that I have some new skills from song school that I want to figure out how to implement and that there are more revisions I want to try – both in the writing and in the arranging – of some of the songs I’m pretty likely to record. But I do need to at least have a plan for a recording process, and start pursuing options. There can be a reasonably long lead-time for recording, and I also put a lot of time into researching the approaches and musical styles of the people I’d consider working with. And it would be too easy to lose steam and not do all the revisions and preparatory work if I don’t have a plan in the works. The bigger opportunity is my day-job sabbatical. I have the year away from teaching and administration work; even while focusing on writing a book I have far more available time than I would usually have. I was expecting to be spending a lot of time this fall recording and time in the spring playing shows to support that recording. That schedule has been upended by the putting off of my recording process. But the primary thing I want to accomplish during this sabbatical is to find a more sane way to organize my life. I want to get into routines (of exercise, of music, of academic writing) that are sustainable and prioritize the things I care about most. It’s easy in academia to take on more and more work and (given the academic programs and priorities I care about, and my general sense of responsibility) I agree to do many more things than I can realistically do while maintaining my happiness. That means that I want to get into the habit of not agreeing to do things just because someone asks me to do them (and to remember that if something relies on me doing it as the only way it will get done then it is not going to be a sustainable endeavor in the long run). I need to say no far more often to academic activities. I also need to think about what I want to be doing in terms of music. There’s always a tradeoff between gaining experience by playing any show opportunity that comes along, and prioritizing only those shows that are going to be enjoyable or genuinely useful exposure. That’s especially true, because the busier your music schedule is, the more likely you are to get selected for a given show. So I haven’t figured out how to manage that tradeoff, but keeping it in the front of my mind when booking things for the upcoming year is important. I also want to work on non-music skills that will help with my music career. I don’t really know how to edit video in any useful way and my graphics skills (for creating posters, etc.) are from some time in 1990s. So there are a lot of skills it would be useful for me to acquire this year – with the logic being that doing the things I’m going to have to be doing will be made much easier by some near-term investment of time in learning these things. But mostly I want to apply to music the same thinking I want to bring to the academic side of my life: I need to prioritize the things that make me remember why I want to be a musician – rediscover my love of music (and of songwriting, arranging, recording, performing), and –while remembering that there are always aspects of “paying your dues,” eschew the things that dampen that enthusiasm. So this academic year I want to have an engaged but balanced year that helps me set the stage for years to come. If I can’t figure out how to make this year comfortable when I remove some of the most time-consuming aspects (and, in the case of administration, least appealing aspects) from it, I have no hope of organizing my life well when those things return. And, conversely, if I can prioritize exercise, sleep, and writing (both song- and academic-) this year and remind myself how wonderful all of those things are, I might be able to continue to make them central to my life once this year is over.