It’s Sunday morning. Just finished a really busy week and I’m looking at my calendar and task list for the rest of the month. I started May just last week thinking that I was finishing up - my school concerts were done, I had one more performance with the Rutgers Alumni Band, I was looking forward to getting back to focusing on some real estate work, cleaning up the yard, and I was finally going to start prepping the boat for the summer. But then life happens. New projects are popping up at work, it keeps raining so I still haven’t gotten to the yard work I’ve been meaning to tackle, I’m trying to put in as many work hours as I can at the yacht club — I need to do fifty a year — my quiet month is quickly turning into another busy one.

I have no right to complain about my task list or my work schedule, I brought this on myself, nobody handed me this list. I built it myself, item by item, and I’ll probably add three more things to it before the week is out. And every time I add something, I tell myself the same thing: I’ll get to it. I’ll catch up.

At some point you have to wonder whether catching up is actually the goal, or just a story that makes the list feel temporary. No matter how much I plan, there’s always more to do. The list just keeps growing, keeps coming at you like a force of nature.

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Taming the Beast

Every now and then it catches up with me — not the workload exactly, but the weight of it. Knowing it’s self-inflicted doesn’t make it any less stressful. The thoughts surface anyway: Did I take on too much? Am I spread too thin to do any of it well?

It never stays long. I get back to work and it fades. But it’s there.

Yesterday at the concert I reached out to the guy who wraps our boat for the winter to get a quote on detailing and prepping it for the water. It’ll cost some money, but it’s hours of work I can check off — one thing done that I won’t need to worry about. It won’t make my task list shorter though. It’s not like I’ll be sitting down enjoying a beer while the crew works on my boat — that saved time will be spent trying to catch up with everything else.

That’s the key issue — no matter how much I plan or delegate, the task list just keeps growing. Life interrupts with pop-up projects, family emergencies, weather delays, things that were fine yesterday and aren’t today. The list isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a condition to be managed. And no matter how well I manage it, I never quite get to the end.

I’ve been telling myself I’ll catch up for years. I’m starting to think that might be the wrong goal entirely.

The Asymptote

I've been reading Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us recently. It's mostly a business book, but the insights cross over into everything. Pink identifies mastery as one of the key drivers of intrinsic motivation — and as a musician and a teacher, that's the part that got my attention. He defines it through the lens of the growth mindset — the idea that ability isn't fixed, that you can always get better — but then he adds something that stopped me cold: mastery, he says, is an asymptote.

An asymptote is a mathematical concept — a straight line that a curve approaches forever but never quite touches. The closer you get, the closer you get — but you never arrive. Pink’s argument is that this is precisely why mastery attracts us. It always eludes us. That’s not a flaw in the pursuit — it’s the nature of it.

That’s my task list. Being caught up is the line. My life is the curve. I keep approaching it but never quite make the landing. That’s not a failure. It’s just the shape of the thing.

Planning isn’t the problem. Better systems, tighter time blocks, hiring someone to prep the boat — none of it changes the geometry. The line moves with you. That’s what makes it an asymptote and not a finish line. That’s not dysfunction — it’s evidence of a life with enough going on to generate more than you can finish. The alternative is a list that never grows, never changes, asks nothing of you. That’s its own kind of problem.

The parallel to mastery was a natural one. You never finish learning an instrument. You never finish learning how to teach — every student needs a different approach. Every piece of music I study or write opens new problems that I need to solve.

When my son was in elementary school he needed extra help with math, and one of his teachers — who my wife and I were not fond of to begin with — said, with complete confidence: “Mr. Puchinsky, I’ve been teaching math for five years. I know every trick in the book.”

Five years. Every trick.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something along the lines of: I’ve been teaching for fifteen years and I’m surprised every day by what I don’t know — and I think that’s a good thing.

If mastery works this way — always approaching, never arriving — then the task list works the same way. Not a failure of planning. Just the same geometry, applied to everything else.

Living Unfinished

Writing this, one composer keeps coming to mind: Charles Ives.

Ives was an American composer — insurance executive by day, musical visionary by night — who spent decades revising his Piano Sonata No. 2, the “Concord” Sonata, producing seventeen revisions, hundreds of patches and sketches, two published editions, and still once wrote that the “Emerson” movement was “the only piece which, every time I play it or turn to it, seems unfinished.”

He didn’t write that as a complaint. He wrote it as though the unfinishedness was the point.

He wrote another piece — shorter, stranger, more direct — titled The Unanswered Question. A solo trumpet asks the same musical phrase seven times. A woodwind quartet attempts an answer each time, growing more frantic and dissonant with every attempt, until finally giving up. The strings play quietly underneath the whole thing, undisturbed, indifferent. The question is never answered. The piece ends the way it began — in silence.

I’ve been thinking about that woodwind quartet. They keep trying. They get louder, more urgent, more tangled up in the effort. They are, in their way, trying to catch up.

Maybe that’s the most honest picture I can offer of where I am on any given Sunday morning — calendar open, task list growing, forsythia still untrimmed, boat still on the blocks. Not failing to finish. Just asking the question again. Showing up to ask it is, I think, the whole thing.

The list will be longer by Tuesday. I’m already looking forward to it.

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I’m driving from New Jersey to Raleigh, North Carolina for our niece’s wedding. We have to be in Raleigh by around 5 or 6 pm for a party that evening. We left around eight, the GPS had us arriving by 3:30 — no rush, plenty of time.

I’m on I-95 heading into Baltimore when Gina checks her phone for our VRBO check-in details — they wouldn’t send them until the day of arrival. Check-in is between 4:00 and 6:00 PM only. The GPS still says 3:30, but I know Virginia. There’s always traffic in Virginia.

Now I’m watching the ETA. We also find out parking isn’t included — it’s “available,” but not included. Gina and I are both aggravated, but we power on.

When my son was younger we made this drive almost every year — Disney World, visiting family in North Port, vacationing in Surf City in North Carolina. Those drives didn’t have deadlines. We weren’t concerned about being on time, just making good time — enjoying the drive, the music, the hours together in the car. I was younger then too. Right now I just want to get out of this car.

The drive reminds me of the time we brought Marisa and my son — they’re about the same age — to Disney. We were worried she’d get car sick, but having Robert in the car took care of that. Robert and Marisa were dirt and water at that age. Separately, fine. Together, mud. They were crazy together, laughing constantly. I still don’t know what “sas” means — they said it in response to everything.

We stayed almost a week. The kids watched Zorro every morning before heading out and sang the theme song all day. There’s one moment from that trip I’ve never forgotten. We’re at dinner in the United Kingdom pavilion at Epcot — I had the bangers and mash — and somewhere around dessert, Marisa turns to the waitress and very politely asks her to say Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. The waitress was taken aback, but she did sound like Mary Poppins, and she was happy to oblige. Only Marisa would think of that.

I keep watching the ETA creep up. We hit the Virginia traffic right on schedule. It set us back about an hour, but once through, we made good time. We pulled in at 4:30, checked in, got a parking pass from the owner, and settled into our tiny one-room condo on the 19th floor. Then we got ready and went to the welcoming party.

Marisa’s a Jersey girl. Her husband is from Georgia. Everyone at this wedding had to travel to get here. Tonight we got to see everyone — and that part was easy.

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The Big Day

The next day I was up before 7:00 AM and headed out for a walk. Got a coffee from a local cafe and wandered around Raleigh, taking photos, listening to music, thinking about what I wanted to say about the wedding in this piece. What is a wedding in the big picture of everything? What does it mean?

I’m not a song and dance guy — I’m not big into loud music and dancing at the reception — but I appreciate the experience. My wife and I didn’t have a huge wedding; we eloped. We were in our early twenties, paying for everything ourselves, and the costs kept climbing. We made the call. My parents were extremely upset — I understand why now, better than I did then — but I don’t regret it. At the time I felt like those elaborate celebrations were just for show — unnecessary, expensive. It was our day, and for the most part that’s still true. Part of me still believes the commitment is what matters most.

Walking around Raleigh the morning before my niece’s wedding, I was starting to see things I hadn’t considered when I got married, or even when my son got married. I was too close to those events. Too close to see clearly. But something about being the uncle — removed enough to just watch — and forcing myself to write and reflect about this event, was shifting my thinking about what all of it is really for.

A Peter Gabriel playlist was still running from the car ride down, and the track Playing for Time came on. Back in 2012 my son, my wife, and I saw Peter Gabriel live at Jones Beach for his Back to Front tour. He opened with a song that was still being worked out — no lyrics, just gibberish and a few odd phrases over piano and Tony Levin’s bass. It was the bones of Playing for Time, a song he wouldn’t release for over ten years. I own that specific concert recording from 2012 and the album that dropped a few years ago. Side by side, it’s the same song.

Listening again, the lyrics hit differently the morning of the wedding.

Far, far away
Out amongst the stars
There’s a planet spinning slowly
We call it ours
Any time, any day
Any moment that we bring to life
Will never fade away

Right from the beginning he’s talking about we — collecting moments together as a couple.

Oh, all the moments come and go
While the memories ebb and flow
And play again, play again
Oh, there’s a hill that we must climb
Climb through all the mists of time
It’s all in here what we’ve been through

When you’re in your twenties you’re still a bit selfish and you can’t possibly understand how fast the world will change around you. Looking back it does feel like climbing a hill — getting through life with all its ups and downs. For me it feels like yesterday we were driving my son and his cousin to Disney, and now we’re here — at Marisa’s wedding day.

There goes the sun, back from where it came
The young move to the center, the mom and dad, the frame
Any space, any time
Any moment that we bring to life, ridiculous, sublime

The children taking the spotlight as the parents resolve to the frame. That’s the turning point, isn’t it? The cycle of watching your kids grow up and then watching them start families of their own. That’s what the wedding day is about. It doesn’t matter if the party is big or small or doesn’t exist at all. The wedding day is one of those road marks in our lives.

That evening at the wedding I got a great shot of Marisa right after their vows. As soon as I saw it on the screen I saw the face of that little girl at Epcot, the one who charmed a British waitress into performing on command — she looks exactly the same now, but I know she’s not.

In searching for what to say about my niece’s big day, I’ve found that meaning isn’t always visible in the moment — it develops over time, the way a song does, the way a child does, and the way we do if we simply take the time to reflect and notice.

Playing for Time lyrics written by Peter Gabriel. ©2023 Real World Music Ltd.

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If this piece resonated, you might also enjoy these two earlier essays — one on what love looks like after the vows, and one on the value of looking back before moving forward.

Why do you care so much anyway? It’s not your money!

That question — asked by an administrator probably a little more than ten years ago — is the one that has me circling back to these same ideas today. I was working at the high school and we had just purchased new sound equipment for our jazz ensemble. We didn’t have a full big band, but most of my kids attended the Jazz for Teens program at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and they could play and improvise. We would do dinner gigs and play one-hour sets at local restaurants, and during our break the piano player and guitarist would just riff, making up melodies and solos to changes they both knew.

My students and I had spent years fundraising to purchase that sound system. When it was lent out and mishandled — someone wrapped the XLR cables carelessly, the way you’d coil an extension cord — I went to complain. The response: Why do you care so much anyway? It’s not your money!

I didn’t have an answer, just frustration. The question was dismissive, but it wasn’t entirely wrong to ask. I didn’t technically own the equipment — it belonged to the board of education. So why did I react the way I did?

That question stayed with me the way certain questions do — not because you can answer them, but because you can’t. My wife had asked one like it years earlier. We were reading in bed when she turned and said, “When you die, on your tombstone, what do you want it to say? Here lies Serge Puchinsky…”

My son was maybe five or six. I was a band director — school days, Wednesday nights, Tuesday and Thursday after school rehearsals, two weeks of band camp in August, Friday night football games, all-day Saturday competitions, Sunday parades — and a boat operator tying up tanker ships on whatever nights and weekends were left. The tombstone question was a test, and I failed. I said “father, husband” — but I hesitated. My first instinct was to say band director. I caught myself, but it was too late. She knew what was in my head.

That hesitation speaks volumes. I had so completely merged with the role that it became identity. And when the role is your identity, every threat to the program becomes a threat to the self. You don’t simply care about the program — you carry the weight of issues that were never yours to carry.

Over the years, the pattern became familiar: picking up things that were never officially mine to carry — other people’s indifference, institutional gaps, the distance between what the work deserved and what it got. At the time, it felt like responsibility; it felt like being a good teacher.

Looking back, that question did me a favor I didn’t recognize at the time — the beginning of a slow separation from a role I had mistaken for an identity.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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What Stoicism Changed in Me

That year, a difficult professional situation resolved itself — not cleanly, but definitively. I decided to leave my position at the high school and returned to elementary band, and to school to get a master’s degree. No drama, no fights or big exits, just a quiet restart and a setting down of something that had become too heavy to carry any longer.

After leaving the high school in 2015, I went back to school to study music composition — composing for the music itself, not for students or performance outcomes. Gradually, my teaching became just that: work I left at work. I was building a creative life that belonged to me.

Then my granddaughter was born, and the world stopped. The pandemic created an unexpected stillness — more hours for reading, writing, and sitting with questions I’d been too busy to ask. When my son was born I was 25 and lost. The second time around, you already know how the story goes.

During the shutdown I was afraid of getting sick. I started walking and working out, and during my walks I started listening to podcasts and books. It was a podcast that introduced me to Ryan Holiday and his book The Obstacle is the Way, then to The Daily Stoic — designed to be read one page a day for a year.

The daily reading led to daily journaling — something I’d done on and off for years, but never with consistency. That daily reflection made something clear: Stoicism didn’t introduce anything new. It simply gave language to something already in motion.

The central insight is old and simple: some things are mine to do, some I may influence but not control, and some are not mine at all. In Stoic practice this has a name — the dichotomy of control. Simple to state. Surprisingly difficult to actually live.

The seeds had been planted earlier than I realized. In college I read The Tao of Pooh, which introduced me to Taoism. After college I kept pulling that philosophical thread: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, then Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, among others. At the time they seemed like separate interests. I couldn’t see the connections or how the philosophy might shape a daily life.

With Stoicism, a pattern snapped into focus. Wu wei — a Taoist concept I’d half-understood since college — suddenly had a frame I could use. They aren’t the same idea: wu wei is about non-forcing, moving with the natural flow of things. The Stoic dichotomy of control is more surgical; it draws a line between what’s yours to act on and what isn’t. Both point you away from forcing what won’t yield — wu wei as a way of navigating through the world, Stoicism as a way of knowing where to direct your effort. The Stoic language was more explicit, more Western, more actionable, but it wasn’t pointing somewhere new. It was pointing at the same territory I’d been circling for years.

The dichotomy of control changed how I respond to situations at school and everywhere in my life. The physical separation probably helped — months away from the building, years really in New Jersey. Eventually I learned to create the same distance in my head. The core shift was this: learning to ask whose task something actually was. What was mine to do, and what wasn’t.

That distinction didn’t make me care less. The caring is still there. But when something goes wrong, I no longer carry the weight of it as if the outcome were entirely mine to own. Caring and carrying turned out to be two different things.

What Caring Without Carrying Looks Like

Three or four days before my most recent concert the principal informed the music staff that a 7th grade class trip had been scheduled for the same day. The afternoon performance had to be canceled. Only select grade levels could attend the single morning show as a result.

In the past, this would have driven me crazy. I would have gotten angry and complained, and nothing would have changed. Now my instinct is different — instead of reacting I lean in, look for the reframe, and try to make the problem work to my advantage. The 7th grade trip debacle, for example, produced an unexpected gift: a full run-through the day before the performance with no audience. Normally the first run-through happens with Pre-K through grade 2 in the seats — which is its own kind of chaos. This time the dress rehearsal was quiet and focused. The curve ball became a plus.

It’s a game now — when something goes wrong, I look for the advantage. Sometimes the curve ball can be reframed. Sometimes it can’t, and you live with that. I stopped treating every surrounding problem as a private emotional assignment.

The situations at work have not improved. Music teachers are still being pulled to act as substitutes, there are still last-minute scheduling changes, and the annual disruption of testing. There’s still a huge gap between what music and arts education deserves and what it gets. What changed is my own daily practice.

Stoicism is a discipline, not a philosophy. The pause before the reaction. The choice not to be consumed by what can’t be controlled. That daily reflection on how the day went and how to approach the next. That’s the whole practice, really.

Some days it’s still a struggle. But at some point the power to choose your response becomes visible — and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. A photographer, after enough time, stops looking at the world and starts framing it. That’s what this practice does to the way you move through a day. You stop reacting to everything and start choosing what deserves your attention.

What I’ve learned is that caring well requires a daily choice — not a feeling that arrives on its own, but a practice that has to be chosen, again and again, in the space between what happens and how you respond. The lesson isn’t to become less dedicated. It’s to become more precise about what dedication actually requires — and to stop mistaking the weight of carrying for evidence that you care.

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When my son Robert, his wife, and my granddaughter needed to find a new place to live, I told them I was excited for them. The truth is I was worried. They’d been renting a house nearby, but the situation had run its course — the landlord wanted more money while quietly pulling back on what the lease included. I knew the rental market. I knew what the process actually cost. It was time to move, and I wanted to make sure they were ready for what that meant.

What I didn’t fully anticipate was what it would mean to be both dad and realtor through the process. As it turns out, it’s kind of the same job — in both roles, you are trying to protect people from avoidable mistakes at a stressful time.

The Month-to-Month Wake-Up Call

One of the first things we had to sort out was confusion about what happens when a lease expires in New Jersey.

A lot of renters assume that once the lease ends, they are suddenly on borrowed time. That is not usually how it works. In New Jersey, if a lease for longer than one month expires and the tenant stays on without signing a new lease, the tenancy generally becomes month-to-month. In most cases, the lease terms continue unless the lease itself says otherwise. And for most residential tenants covered by New Jersey’s Anti-Eviction Act, a landlord cannot evict someone simply because the lease term expired.

That was the situation Robert was in. His lease had expired in December 2024. January passed without a renewal. By February, the landlord came back with new terms: more money, less access, and new restrictions on items that had previously been included. Robert and his wife were worried they could be forced out if they did not sign. That was not quite right, but the answer was not as simple as “don’t worry about it,” either.

In New Jersey, if a landlord proposes reasonable and substantial changes at the end of a lease term and the tenant refuses them, the landlord may try to evict on that basis. But that still does not mean the landlord can simply push a tenant out. The landlord must go through court, and the court decides whether the proposed changes were reasonable.

That distinction matters.

It means a new lease is not something you sign automatically out of fear. It is a contract. If the landlord is changing rent, access, utilities, fees, appliances, parking, or other material terms, those changes deserve to be read carefully and, when necessary, challenged.

It also means tenants should understand that New Jersey’s protections are strong, but not universal. The Anti-Eviction Act generally does not apply the same way to certain owner-occupied properties with only a small number of rental units. In those settings, the rules can be different.

Robert decided not to sign. He and his family put their belongings in storage, moved in with my wife and me temporarily, and started over.

The Decision to Hire a Real Estate Agent

At first, Robert and his wife were not sure they needed one. Like a lot of renters, they assumed they could search online, find a place, and handle the application themselves. That is how they found their first rental, and plenty of people do it that way. But in competitive markets, speed matters. Presentation matters too. A good rental application is not just a form. It is a packet. It tells a story about stability, reliability, and readiness before a landlord ever meets you.

And whether tenants like it or not, broker involvement is often already built into the process. Some rentals are listed through agents, and broker fees are still common in many parts of New Jersey rental practice, even though the exact structure can vary by listing, landlord, and market. That is less a legal rule than a market reality. What a good agent adds is not magic. It is organization, access, judgment, and the ability to spot problems before your name is on the lease.

They decided to work with me and my broker at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices McGeehan & Pineiro Realty. That meant a formal application process, which is exactly what makes a strong rental application stand out.

The Document Stack

The renters who do best in a competitive market are usually not the ones who scramble fastest after seeing a place they love. They are the ones who arrive ready. Before Robert’s family toured a single apartment, we assembled the full document stack:

• government-issued photo ID for each adult applicant

• recent pay stubs

• W-2s and tax returns

• recent bank statements

• a rental application with screening and background information

Most landlords also want to see income that is around three times the monthly rent, though that standard is a market convention rather than a statewide statute. One issue that came up for Robert was credit presentation. He had recently financed a new car, and that new debt and inquiry activity did not help the way his file looked at first glance. Credit reports commonly include inquiry history, and landlords using tenant-screening reports may look at more than just a headline score. They may also review payment history, collections, judgments, eviction records, and other risk indicators depending on the screening product being used.

To give a fuller picture, we also used a three-bureau credit report showing data from TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian. Three-bureau reports are widely available consumer products, and in this case it helped show a broader and more accurate picture than a single screening snapshot. That turned out to matter.

People talk about credit score as if it is the whole story. It is not. A landlord may care about the score, but they are also looking at patterns. Do you pay on time? Are there collections? Are there judgments? Does your income support the rent? Have you been a solid tenant before? For Robert’s apartment at $2,075 per month, the rough three-times-income rule meant showing about $6,225 in gross monthly income. He cleared that number comfortably.

Rental history matters too. A landlord who calls a previous landlord and gets a warm, specific response feels far more comfortable than one who gets a terse non-answer. The quality of that conversation can move an application forward or stall it entirely.

A co-signer may also be requested, even when income clearly qualifies. Before agreeing to co-sign for anyone, understand what you’re actually committing to — a co-signer is legally responsible for the full lease obligation if the primary tenant defaults. It’s not a character reference. It’s a financial guarantee.

The Weight of Moving

The original ask from the landlord was significant: one and a half months’ security deposit — the maximum allowed under New Jersey law — plus one month in broker fees split between both agents. Combined with first month’s rent, that was a move-in cost of roughly $7,262 before a single box was packed.

That is the sort of number that stops people cold. Renting is not always the cheaper option. Taking time to find the right place and staying there for several years is the right move. Moving annually is a cost most renters cannot afford.

Using the stronger three-bureau credit report, I made the case for reducing the security deposit. The landlord agreed to cut it from one and a half months to one month. The stronger credit report saved Robert’s family just over $1,000 before they moved a single piece of furniture. Having the right paperwork paid off, but money is only part of the equation. The disruption, the storage, the lost time, the stress on everyone in the household — it adds up in ways that don’t show up on a balance sheet.

Here’s what the checklists don’t capture: moving is exhausting in a way that goes beyond the physical. Robert and his family had to pack up their lives, put things in storage, move back in with my wife and me, and continue going to work and school every single day as if nothing major was happening. My granddaughter’s routine was disrupted. The house felt different with five people in it again. The stress of the search ran alongside the stress of the transition — and none of it paused for the rest of life to catch up.

Every week without a signed lease feels like a week of instability. Every apartment that doesn’t work out feels like a setback. A competitive rental market doesn’t care that you also have a job to get to and a child to get to school. Give yourself permission to take it one step at a time. Get your documents together before you tour. Know your real budget before you fall in love with a place. And if you can, have someone in your corner who knows the process — not because you can’t figure it out alone, but because you have enough to carry already.

And then, eventually, it lifts.

The new apartment is smaller on paper — two bedrooms instead of three, less storage. But the living space is significantly larger, the kitchen actually works for a family, and driveway parking is included. So are heat and water — utilities that started out included at the old place, then quietly became conditional as that landlord relationship wore down. The new monthly cost is $2,075. The old place was heading to $2,400 with utilities increasingly on Robert’s tab. The smaller apartment costs less, uses less, and gives them more room to actually live in every day. On paper it looked like a step down. It wasn’t.

A Few Final Things Every Renter Should Know

• Read the lease before you sign. Every line. If something feels off, have a professional review it.

• Know what’s included. Heat, water, parking, laundry — utilities change the true monthly cost of any rental significantly.

• Understand grace periods in your state. In New Jersey, the statutory 5-business-day grace period applies to seniors and certain public assistance tenants. For everyone else, it depends on what’s in the lease — make sure you know what you’re agreeing to before you sign.

• Month-to-month is not the end of the world. But it’s a signal to start planning — and to understand your rights before a new lease lands on the table.

• Your credit report is a snapshot, not a verdict. If it doesn’t reflect your full picture, a tri-merge report can tell a more complete story — and may give you real negotiating leverage.

• Budget for three months of rent in liquid cash before you begin. That’s the real number nobody tells you upfront.

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Renting is just one piece of the picture. If you’re thinking about what comes next — or what came before — here are a few other articles from the archive worth a look:

I do not think I am completely burned out, at least not yet. But after thirty-four years in public schools, I can see the road more clearly than I used to. I know what it feels like to care deeply about the work while living under pressures I cannot fully control. I can see how teachers become depleted, cynical, or detached. I can also see, at least sometimes, how to step off that road before it becomes the only way forward.

In my last essay, I described a form of burnout driven less by workload than by misalignment.

Burnout = (Care × Responsibility) / Leverage

The equation is imperfect, but useful. It describes what happens when deep caring and real responsibility are no longer matched by enough leverage to act. By leverage, I mean authority and autonomy: the ability to make decisions and respond meaningfully to what you see. When teachers have that leverage, caring fuels the work. When they do not, it begins to drain them.

For music teachers and other specialists, that imbalance can become especially sharp. We are asked to care deeply, produce visible results, and carry real responsibility for students and programs while often having less control over schedules, priorities, budgets, facilities, and the basic conditions that make good teaching possible.

That is the contradiction. The labor is real. The responsibility is real. The expectations are real. But the institutional support is often conditional, thin, or absent.

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The Unanswered Question

Charles Ives wrote a piece by that title in 1908, built around what he called “the perennial question of existence.” I have been circling my own version of this problem for a long time. Back in 1995, I published a short article in a conference journal at New Jersey City University called Why Do We Teach Music? It traced some of the history of music education and the recurring ways music and the arts are pushed to the margins, especially when schools define value in narrower academic terms.

More than thirty years after I first wrote about this problem, I find myself circling a stubborn version of that same question: not why we teach music, but whether schools are prepared to treat it with the respect it deserves.

Music and art teachers have a clear sense of why they teach. They understand the value of the arts, the habits of attention they cultivate, and the ways they connect students to culture, history, and human expression. What is less clear is whether the institution around them shares that understanding in any durable way.

In many schools, music and the arts are treated less like core parts of a student’s education and more like enrichment—valuable when convenient, expendable when not. You can see it in scheduling, budgeting, fragmentation, and the quiet assumption that arts teachers will absorb the instability and keep the program going anyway.

No one has to say outright that the work does not matter. The system communicates that message through its habits. And that is where this form of burnout begins: not in dramatic collapse, but in the repeated experience of being held responsible for work the institution refuses to fully support.

If the arts were treated as essential, the structure of school would look different. They would not be pushed to the edges of the day or defended only when convenient. They would be given time, space, continuity, and some protection from being treated as the first flexible piece in every institutional adjustment.

But that is rarely how school is organized. Teachers are divided by scheduling conflicts, fragmented space, institutional priorities, and the daily pressure to protect tested subjects first. The arts are not usually woven into the center of school life. More often, they are asked to work around the edges of it.

That is where the frustration takes hold. Arts teachers can see not only the work itself, but the conditions it requires. They can see what is missing because they can also see what the work could be under better conditions.

And that is where burnout deepens: not simply in overwork, but in the repeated gap between what the work requires and what the system is willing to protect.

Built Into the Building

You can see the gap in the ordinary mechanics of school life, starting with the physical spaces where subjects are taught. Most classroom teachers have a room that is recognizably theirs. Art and music teachers often do not. Music teachers may be expected to work from a cart and push into someone else’s classroom. For instrumental teachers, the situation can be worse. Lessons are held in closets, auditoriums, backstage corners, or whatever borrowed space can be found. Sometimes the only way to teach is to displace another teacher for part of the day.

That arrangement tells you something. It tells you which subjects are assumed to belong and which are expected to adapt.

In my own case, I have been fortunate. I have always had a band room. But even that tells a story. When the building where I now work opened in 1992, it included dedicated spaces for the arts. Since then, the general music room has become a pre-k classroom, the rehearsal space has been divided in two, and other parts of the building have been repurposed to meet more pressing institutional needs. In the other building where I teach, the general music teacher has to give up the room so I can teach instrumental lessons on the day I am there.

That, too, is part of the pattern. Even where arts space exists, it often remains vulnerable—available until something else is deemed more necessary.

Built Into the Schedule

The same pattern shows up in the schedule. Time is allocated according to what the system treats as most important, and the arts are often expected to fit around those priorities. Core subjects receive protected instructional time. Prep periods must be covered. Testing schedules override almost everything. What remains is handed to the arts, along with the expectation that we will adapt.

This logic becomes especially visible when schools need coverage. In my district, the recent addition of pre-k classes created a new demand for prep coverage, and that burden fell on the specials teachers: music, art, physical education, and technology. Each of us now spends one period of the day, at least two or three days a week, in a pre-k classroom so the classroom teacher can have a prep period. We are not there to teach our own subject. In practice, we are there to satisfy a staffing requirement. At one point it was described to me, bluntly and accurately, as needing “an adult with a degree” in the room.

Testing reveals the same logic in a different form. There was a time when testing required adjustments, but not total disruption. I could rearrange my schedule to teach students who were not testing in the morning and see the others later in the day. Other specials teachers could do something similar, swapping a morning class for one in the afternoon. It was not ideal, but instruction still continued.

Now the response is different. During testing season, music, art, and physical education teachers are assigned to gang preps in the gymnasium for five or six weeks. For that stretch, the entire student body stops receiving gym, art, and music classes in any meaningful sense. The first time this happened, we were given one day’s notice. Curriculum plans were simply set aside. Last year I saw my third grade music class only two or three times during the entire last trimester. Band lessons were canceled altogether, effectively ending that part of the program in April.

After enough experiences like that, the question starts to change. It is no longer only about how to adjust the schedule. It becomes a deeper question about the work itself: what exactly is the job? Because for long stretches of the year, the system does not seem to think the job is teaching music.

Shock Absorbers of the System

The same pattern appears in budgets, facilities, and staffing. The details vary, but the message is consistent: the arts are expected to keep functioning under conditions that would be unacceptable in other parts of the school.

Arts teachers serve as the system’s shock absorbers. We are the part expected to bend, cover, absorb, and disappear on command so that the larger machine can keep moving.

This is not always the result of malice or even disregard at the individual level. Administrators are responding to pressures that are very real: student safety, contractual obligations, staffing shortages, and state-mandated testing. But that is precisely the point. When difficult decisions are made, the arts are where the system looks first for flexibility. The arts are treated less as protected instruction and more as a built-in buffer that helps keep the institution running.

Naming the pattern matters, even when changing it is difficult. The point is not to complain about it, but to see it clearly. Once we do, we can respond with more honesty about what is ours to carry, what is not, and how to keep doing the work without being quietly consumed by it.

Preparing for the Road Ahead

There is no clean fix for these conditions. If arts teachers are going to survive this work over the long haul, they need some way to adjust their understanding of the role without losing their sense of purpose.

Arts teachers are often deeply fused with their profession. For many of us, this is not just a job but a craft, a discipline, and part of our identity. That connection can be a source of meaning, but it can also become a liability. When the work is repeatedly interrupted, diminished, or repurposed, it is easy to experience those conditions not simply as frustrations in the job, but as injuries to the self.

I have found that surviving this requires some measure of emotional distance from the job. Not indifference. Not apathy. Something more like perspective. That has meant building habits of reflection: reading Stoic writers, journaling, and returning to the distinction between what is mine to control and what is not. None of that removes the strain, but it does help me meet it with more clarity and less confusion.

It also means recognizing a distinction between the work I can shape and the disruptions I cannot. I have some control over what happens inside my classroom: how I teach, what I emphasize, how I respond, and the standards I bring to the work. Beyond that circle are the interruptions that so often define school life: missed lessons, canceled classes during testing season, and abrupt schedule changes that wipe out plans I have worked hard to build. Just recently, an afternoon performance had to be canceled because a mandatory seventh-grade field trip was scheduled for the same day as our spring concert. There was a time when that kind of thing would have left me angry for days. Now I try to meet it with less outrage and more clarity. The disruption is real, but it does not get to define the whole meaning of the work.

That kind of perspective is necessary, but it is not the whole answer. A music program cannot run on reflection alone. An art teacher cannot journal a school into valuing the arts structurally. Personal clarity matters, but it does not replace institutional support.

Why Advocacy Still Matters

One thing I understand more clearly now than I did earlier in my career is the importance of advocacy. Like many music teachers, I put most of my energy into the teaching itself: rehearsals, lessons, concerts, planning, and the thousand daily details required to keep a program alive. I assumed that if the work was strong enough, its value would speak for itself. I am not sure that is true. Good work matters, but in many schools it still requires someone willing to name its value clearly and repeatedly. Administrators, teachers, and parents need to be reminded of the value of the arts. My own mother once said to me in surprise, “You mean you have to do lesson plans like a real teacher?” Even our own family members sometimes need to be reminded.

I do not mean that every teacher must become a public spokesperson, or that advocacy should fall mainly on the people already carrying the daily work of the program. In some ways, that is part of the problem. But I do think many of us come to realize, sooner or later, that silence has a cost. When the arts are not spoken for clearly, they are more easily treated as flexible, secondary, or expendable.

In the end, this is what makes the work so difficult. Arts teachers often have to do two jobs at once: teach the work itself and keep explaining why the work deserves to exist. That second task can become its own form of exhaustion. Private discipline can help a teacher endure that reality with more clarity. But for the work to remain healthy over time, clarity must be joined by voice. Not louder voices, necessarily. Just steadier ones. That is difficult work, and not every teacher is in a position to take it on without risk. When no one at the administrative level is doing that work, the arts are more easily left to slip through the cracks.

Under these conditions, burnout is not simply exhaustion. It is what happens when care is made to serve a system that no longer gives the work enough room to breathe—a burden heavy enough to wear down even the most devoted among us.

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If you’d like to keep reading, here are a few related essays.

When I’m rehearsing with a group or teaching a lesson at school, things make sense.

I’m responsible for the music and I have real authority over the conditions that shape the work. I can stop the group, slow the tempo, isolate a section, and change the plan on the fly. I can focus on specific skills, build habits, and hear the difference when it starts to click.

Of course, there are variables. Students get pulled for testing. Field trips. A schedule change. Sometimes a kid simply doesn’t want to miss art, so they miss my lesson instead. Even on the best days, not everything is in my control. Over the course of many years—and a lot of lived frustration, and sometimes outright anger—I’ve learned the difference between variables and powerlessness.

The Parking Lot

When I taught high school, our marching band rehearsed after school on the parking lot behind the football stadium. Most days it worked. But some days we showed up to a lot full of cars—parked straight across our rehearsal space, right down the fifty-yard line.

There was only so much I could do. I’d call the office and ask for an all-call announcement, but there was no policy to enforce and no urgency anyone else could feel. Even if people eventually moved their cars, we’d lose half the rehearsal waiting. The obstacle belonged to other people, but the consequences and frustration landed on me and my staff.

And when the cars didn’t move, we still worked.

We re-blocked, compressed the drill, and marched around cars. We made do, because we cared about our kids and our program—and because we knew help wasn’t coming any time soon.

That’s the key idea: when the obstacle belongs to someone else, the responsibility still lands on the people doing the work.

That’s where burnout starts.

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The Wrong Diagnosis

Most conversations about teacher burnout start in the same place: workload, low pay, large classes, too many meetings, too many emails, not enough hours in the day. Those things are real and measurable, but they don’t fully explain the kind of burnout that sneaks up on you — the kind that doesn’t feel like exhaustion so much as erosion.

There are two kinds of burnout, and we tend to only talk about one of them.

The first is quantitative burnout. Too much to do, too little time, too few resources, and often too little compensation. It is the burnout of overload and imbalance: too many demands, not enough support, not enough hours, not enough pay. It’s visible, it’s nameable, and while it’s genuinely hard to fix, at least everyone agrees it exists.

The second kind is harder to name. Let’s call it qualitative burnout. It can happen even when the workload is manageable and the pay is fair. It happens when you’re asked to guarantee results without being allowed to control the conditions. You’re responsible for the outcome, but the conditions that shape that outcome are outside your reach. Over time, that gap between responsibility and control starts to wear a person down.

When you’re experiencing qualitative burnout, you’re still showing up. You’re still doing your job, still performing your duties, still giving students what they need in the moment. From the outside, everything looks fine. But internally, something is shifting, unnoticeably at first. You start absorbing outcomes you didn’t create, carrying consequences that belong to a system that isn’t carrying them with you.

And when you’re a teacher—someone who chose this work, who believes in it, who has tied their sense of self to doing it well—that misalignment doesn’t register as a systems problem. It registers as personal failure: a steady frustration and a quiet kind of powerlessness.

That confusion matters. It’s where the real damage happens.

The Burnout Equation

In my own career, and in the careers of the many educators I’ve worked alongside and talked with over the years, I’ve noticed that the path to deep burnout runs through four specific variables: caring, responsibility, authority, and autonomy. Not in isolation, but in relationship to each other.

Here’s the equation that captures it:

Burnout = (Caring × Responsibility) / (Authority × Autonomy)

Each variable matters. But it’s the relationship between them that determines whether the work sustains you or slowly hollows you out.

Caring is your moral and emotional investment in the work. It’s the part of you that wants the lesson to land, the concert to go well, the kid in the back row to finally get it. Caring is why you became a teacher and why you stay. It’s not a weakness. But it is a multiplier — and that matters more than most people realize.

Responsibility is the expectation that outcomes are on you. When the concert falls flat, when a student struggles, when the program loses momentum — responsibility is the weight of knowing that, at least in part, this is yours to answer for. Responsibility isn’t inherently bad either. Paired with the right conditions, it’s clarifying. It focuses your energy. But it can also become a trap.

Authority is leverage — the actual ability to shape the conditions of your work. In a classroom, authority looks like: I can stop the rehearsal. I can change the tempo, change the plan, change the approach. I can respond to what I’m seeing in real time. Authority is what makes responsibility feel fair rather than punishing.

Autonomy is the freedom to decide how you do the work — your pacing, your methods, your sequence, your voice. It’s different from authority. Authority is about conditions; autonomy is about approach. A teacher can have authority over a room and still feel micromanaged in how they’re expected to run it. Both matter. When they’re present together, they create the conditions for sustainable, energized work.

The equation works like this: when authority and autonomy are high, caring becomes fuel. You can see a problem, respond to it, solve it, and watch it get better. The caring feeds the work, and the work feeds the caring back.

But when authority and autonomy shrink — when you’re held responsible for outcomes you can’t meaningfully influence — caring stops being fuel and starts becoming a burden. Obstacles you can’t remove become an emotional tax. Consequences you didn’t create still become yours to carry, drawing from a reserve that doesn’t automatically replenish.

Caring becomes carrying.

Carrying the consequences of problems you didn’t create inside a system you can’t fix.

Think of it as a three-legged stool: caring, responsibility, and leverage — where leverage is the combination of authority and autonomy. When the legs are roughly equal, the stool is stable. Hard work feels clean. You’re tired at the end of the day, but not compromised. You feel the weight of the work, but it doesn’t feel unfair.

When the legs are unequal — when responsibility is high and leverage is low — the stool tips. And the deeper your caring, the harder you fall, because caring doesn’t insulate you from that imbalance. It amplifies it.

Burnout isn’t caused by caring too much. Burnout is caused by caring in a system that repeatedly refuses to meet you halfway.

Most teachers don’t realize what’s happening in the moment because it hides in plain sight: the frustration comes from carrying tasks that were never theirs to carry.

The trap is that it doesn’t feel like overreach—it feels like being a good teacher.

The Pattern Worth Interrupting

I still think about that parking lot.

Not with bitterness — or at least not only with bitterness. I think about it because it taught me something true about work inside an institution: the institution will not always match your level of care. Obstacles will appear that belong to someone else. Help will not always arrive. And still, you keep working, because the kids are there, and the music is there, and to you that matters.

That is not weakness. It is one of the most admirable things about teachers, and music teachers in particular. But admirable is not the same thing as sustainable.

Part of surviving this work is learning to see it clearly. Just because something matters deeply to you does not mean it will matter equally to the people running the system. That is not cynicism; it is clarity — the kind that helps you recognize the difference between what is truly yours to carry and what never was. And recognition is where steadier forms of caring begin.

The parking lot was never my fault. Neither are many of the forces that wear teachers down. But they become much more damaging when we keep interpreting them as personal failures, or keep expecting the system to behave like a partner when often it behaves more like weather.

You cannot negotiate with weather. You adjust to it.

That doesn’t mean giving up or not caring at all. It means learning the difference between what deserves your effort and what will only drain it. It means caring fully inside your circle of influence, and refusing to measure yourself by problems you were never given the power to solve.

The teachers who care most are often the ones who absorb the most. They volunteer first, compensate quietly, stay late, cover gaps, carry extra weight, and blame themselves when the larger structure does not hold. That pattern does not have to continue.

Not every problem can be fixed. Not every obstacle can be removed. Not every battle belongs to you.

But if you can learn to care without taking responsibility for everything, to teach without internalizing every institutional failure, and to hold on to what is actually yours to shape, then the work becomes lighter in an important way. Not easier. But cleaner.

And that may be the beginning of something like endurance.

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Further Reading

When I was a kid marching in drum and bugle corps, we had a running joke: we didn’t need to tune—the horns were tuned at the factory. As a sixth grader, I took this literally. We would warm up, tune to one note, and then just wail. Tuning to one pitch, however, doesn’t solve the problem of intonation.

What is Intonation?

Most people understand the basic idea of an instrument being “in tune.” It has a reference pitch to align with, a single note to match as a starting point. Stringed instruments like the violin or guitar tune each string to its specific pitch.

Wind instruments are a little different. They tune to a single pitch, but that doesn’t automatically bring the full range of the instrument into tune. Like string players placing their fingers precisely, wind players adjust as they play—tiny changes in their face muscles and air support to keep each note centered. Every instrument has notes that tend to run sharp (a little high) or flat (a little low), and experienced players learn to anticipate and correct for them as they perform.

Intonation is also affected by things outside the player’s control: temperature, humidity, whether the instrument is warm or cold, how long it’s been played that day, and the player’s physical endurance.

The point is this: instruments can’t be tuned once and left alone. Good intonation requires focused attention, small corrections made in the moment. It’s maintenance, not a setting. Conditions shift, and the player has to respond rather than assume everything is fine. A good musician is always listening—both to their own sound and to the ensemble—making micro-adjustments in real time and sometimes even making mechanical tweaks to the instrument itself.

This is usually glossed over with beginners because they’re still working on producing a basic tone. Teachers are happy the clarinet sounds like a clarinet and not an animal in distress. But good intonation depends on solid tone and technique.

While teaching intonation recently to more advanced students, I started noticing how often the same mistake shows up outside of music: we assume that if something was set correctly once, it should stay that way—that systems hold without tending, routines keep working without revisiting, relationships stay stable without attention. The problem is, intonation doesn’t work that way, and neither do most of the things that matter.

Tuning In Everyday Life

Good intonation isn’t about arriving at the correct pitch and staying there. It’s about listening, noticing drift, and making small corrections before things fall apart. It’s not dramatic. It’s quiet. Often invisible. Players who struggle most with intonation aren’t necessarily careless or inattentive. They usually just can’t yet hear the small differences that matter. Until you can hear those differences, you can’t correct them—no matter how much effort you apply.

Once I started thinking about intonation this way, it became hard not to see it everywhere. Most of the problems we struggle with in daily life aren’t the result of sudden failure. They’re the result of gradual drift—small deviations that stay below our threshold of awareness for a long time. By the time we notice something is off, the adjustment required is larger, more disruptive, and often harder to make.

That idea sits underneath several things I’ve written about recently, even before I realized the connection to playing in tune.

In a piece about homeownership, I argued that the homeowners who seem to “have it together” aren’t necessarily more skilled—they’ve simply built small habits that keep them slightly ahead of their house instead of permanently reacting to it. Notice one thing a week. Write one sentence when something gets repaired. Spend ten minutes a month asking what future-you will wish you had handled sooner. None of those habits fix anything on their own. What they do is keep things from drifting far enough out of alignment that a major correction becomes necessary.

That’s intonation.

You don’t wait until the ensemble sounds bad enough to stop rehearsal. You warm up, tune from the start, and then listen constantly, making small quiet adjustments while you’re still close to center. The work isn’t dramatic, and it rarely feels productive in the moment—but it prevents bigger problems later.

The same logic appeared in a piece about winter. The argument there wasn’t that winter is something to push through—it’s that winter is a change in conditions, and the mistake is pretending those conditions don’t exist. The solution isn’t to fight it; it’s to re-tune your life to work with it. Scale back. Maintain what matters. Stay connected to the work in smaller, quieter ways until the conditions shift again.

Musicians understand this instinctively when performing. Cold instruments play flat. Hot instruments play sharp—anyone who has marched drum corps in summer heat knows this firsthand. You don’t blame the weather. You adjust. You accept that what worked in one season won’t automatically work in another, and you tune accordingly.

Staying Close to Center

What all of these ideas share is a refusal to treat life as something that can be set correctly once and left alone. They assume change, variability, and drift as the norm. The work isn’t in finding the perfect setting. The work is in staying close enough to center that the adjustments remain small.

Once you start thinking this way, tune-ups show up everywhere—if you simply stop to notice. Short walks that clear the mind before frustration hardens. Small decluttering sessions that keep disorder from becoming overwhelming. Brief creative check-ins that maintain contact with the work, even when momentum is low. Quiet moments with your partner to reconnect after a long day.

None of these are dramatic. That’s the point. Most things don’t collapse suddenly. They drift until the adjustment becomes a crisis.

The underlying philosophy: tune-ups reward consistency over intensity.

You tune an instrument because you expect it to fall out of tune. You don’t take it personally. You don’t treat it as a failure. You simply respond and adjust. We’d do well to treat the rest of our lives with the same generosity.

Tune early. Tune often. And don’t mistake a tune-up for a failure—it’s a sign you’re paying attention.

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More on the same theme—small maintenance beats big rescue:

It’s the end of January. School is under an emergency half-day schedule; no one is attending lessons. Instead of teaching much of anything, I spend part of the morning looking up places to take Gina for Valentine’s Day. Reservations need to be made early if we want a decent option that weekend. It’s also our granddaughter’s birthday, which means coordinating schedules, babysitting, and figuring out which evening—if any—we’ll actually be free. I text back and forth with my wife, trading options and schedules.

None of this feels especially romantic. But it does feel familiar.

At this point, surprises are mostly off the table. There are too many moving parts, and I’m not always in the loop. That’s not a complaint—just the reality of the life we’ve built together.

When we first started dating—more than thirty years ago—I was more spontaneous, more inclined toward grand gestures. Like most marriages, that phase eventually gave way to something quieter and more complicated. Not worse. Just different. My wife and I are largely in sync on this—and we try to be spontaneous when we can—but it isn’t always easy.

Valentine’s Day, however, still comes with its expectations: flowers, candy, reservations, a well-timed night out. Those things matter—we need to keep some romance in our relationship—but they’re also a thin cover for what love usually looks like day-to-day: coordination, negotiation, responsibility, and choice.

Most of the time, that’s the part we’re actually living.

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Love as Practice

Recently, I read The Courage to Be Happy by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, the follow-up to The Courage to Be Disliked. The book offers an extended exploration of Adlerian psychology—or perhaps more accurately, its philosophy—and it has had a quiet but lasting impact on how I think about participation and responsibility: what it means to stay in relationship with work, with friends, and especially with the people we love.

Reading it also brought to mind another book about love—one I’ve returned to several times since being introduced to it in college: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. Different in tone and intent, but similarly unsentimental, it treats love not as a promise or a destination, but as something revealed through action, failure, and attention over time.

The Life Task of Love

Alfred Adler describes three primary life tasks: work, friendship—often framed as a sense of community—and love. I won’t attempt to unpack Adler’s full philosophy here. Instead, I want to focus on one task in particular: the life task of love.

The Courage to Be Happy is structured as a dialogue between a philosopher and a young man—a choice that allows Adler’s ideas to unfold through the challenge and resistance of dialogue rather than explanation alone.

There was one passage that stayed with me for several days and ultimately led me to this essay. In it, the student suggests that he has not yet found love because he has not met the “right person,” and the philosopher directly challenges that assumption.

You are focusing on the story of Cinderella in her glass slippers, up until she gets married to the prince. Adler, on the other hand, is focused on their relationship after they get married—after the closing credits have passed and the movie is over. … Even if passionate love leads to marriage, that is not the goal of love. Marriage is really the starting point. Because real life continues, day after day, from that point.

That idea stayed with me in the days that followed: Marriage is the starting point—the moment two people begin the real work of building a shared life. Most of our cultural stories about love focus on the “falling in love” part.

Adler is interested in what comes after.

Love to the human being is neither something prescribed by destiny, nor something spontaneously generated. That is to say, we do not “fall” in love. … It is something we build. Love that is just “falling,” anyone can do. Such a thing is not worthy of being called a life task. It is because we build it up from nothing by our strength of will that the task of love is difficult.

Love isn’t the dramatic moment that leads to commitment; it’s the choices we make in daily life after the commitment. There is no “happily ever after” in Adler’s framing. That can only be defined in retrospect, after a life of love has been built over time—through the daily, unfinished work of choosing each other.

But how do we build that something? Where do we learn how to build a relationship of love?

Love Has No Training Manual

This is Adler’s uncomfortable pivot. If love is not something we fall into, not something guaranteed by fate or chemistry, then it must be learned and practiced. And yet, unlike work or citizenship, love has no obvious training ground. There is no syllabus, no apprenticeship, no clear feedback loop.

When love becomes difficult, most of us instinctively reach for the skills we have been taught: we try harder, we optimize, we explain, we assert control, or we withdraw. But those tools belong to other life tasks. Love does not respond to individual effort the way work does, nor does it function like participation in a group or institution.

Adler’s claim is not that love is mysterious or unknowable—we are simply miseducated for it. We are well trained for independence and achievement, reasonably trained for cooperation in groups—but poorly prepared for the one task that requires sustained equality, mutual choice, and shared responsibility between two people over time.

In a marriage, there’s no syllabus and no final exam. What matters most happens in the ordinary, ungraded moments—whether you’re present, attentive, and willing to keep working together.

The Missing Curriculum

Adler points out that in schools and in our society we do an excellent job teaching tasks that can be completed by one person. We teach academic achievement, technical competence, artistic and athletic mastery—domains where effort, discipline, and persistence reliably lead to improvement. The lesson is clear: if you work hard enough, you will get better.

We also teach how to function within a community. Students learn to be part of a team, to collaborate on projects, to participate in organizations and institutions. But even here, cooperation is often framed through competition, and leadership is frequently modeled as control or hierarchy rather than equality. Someone is in charge; others follow.

What we do not teach is how to remain equal in a close relationship. We do not teach how to share responsibility without dominance or submission, how to stay engaged without control, or how to tolerate uncertainty without withdrawing. These are precisely the skills the task of love demands.

And this omission is not accidental. Love resists grading and metrics. Unlike work or teamwork, it cannot be optimized, completed, or mastered once and for all. It’s something that we must practice every day for the rest of our lives.

The Quiet Relief

Is this an excuse for forgetting an anniversary or letting romance fade into the background? No. If anything, it raises the bar. Love isn’t something we can confine to holidays or special occasions and expect to hold together on its own.

What Adler offers is something quieter: love not as a feeling that happens to us, but as a practice we learn and hone over time.

If love is a task, then it doesn’t vanish when it feels ordinary, or when the days are full of logistics instead of poetry. It shows up in the small decisions that make up a shared life: coordinating schedules, carrying responsibility together, staying engaged even when it would be easier to retreat into parallel routines.

That’s the part we’re usually living, so why not call it out for what it is—the part that really matters. The daily decisions and choices that keep two people together over the course of time.

The flowers still matter. The reservations still matter. They’re not foolish or unnecessary, but they’re not the foundation. They’re gestures that rest on something deeper: two people continuing to choose each other, not once, but repeatedly, in ways that don’t always announce themselves.

After more than thirty years together, I don’t think love is smaller than I once imagined. I think it’s sturdier, deeper. Less theatrical, maybe—but more trustworthy. Less about being swept up, and more about staying put.

And maybe that’s the point Adler was making all along.

Love doesn’t end when the story settles down. That’s when it really begins.

Most days, this is the version of love we’re actually awake for.

Built slowly, deliberately, and sometimes imperfectly, by two people who keep deciding that the work is worth doing.

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If this essay resonated, two earlier pieces explore related themes—attention to ordinary days, and the value of adjustment over reinvention. You may find them useful companions to this one.

January always feels a little strange.

The holidays are over, the calendar flips, and suddenly I’m supposed to feel energized, focused, and ready to charge forward. But that’s not how January actually feels. The days are short. The light is thin. My energy is uneven. Instead of clarity, I feel the quiet pressure to move faster than my energy and attention actually allow.

I used to treat winter as something to get through. I pushed harder, planned more, and expected myself to operate as if nothing had changed. It never worked. Winter always pushed back.

It has always required a different approach—less urgency, less acceleration, and more restraint.

That’s where the idea of a creative reset comes in. Not a restart. Not a reinvention. A recalibration that works with winter, instead of fighting it.

This essay grows out of an earlier piece I called January Walk. That article explored walking as a way to find clarity during a season that resists urgency. What follows is a deeper look at those same ideas—what happens when we stop trying to outpace winter and start working with it instead.

Reset vs. Resolutions

In the past, my wife and I would always have the “resolutions conversation” sometime around the new year—and neither of us ever followed through. Not once.

This past year, I started exploring different ideas: setting intentions instead of resolutions, and thinking in terms of systems rather than goals.

Resolutions assume you’ll be able to motivate yourself and maintain momentum long enough to reach an outcome. They focus on what you want to change, but rarely on how your days actually work—or why those patterns exist in the first place.

This year, instead of setting resolutions, I’m resetting the systems that drive my life. I’m paying closer attention to where my focus and energy are realistically needed, and planning only a few months at a time instead of pretending I can predict the year ahead.

Winter makes this approach harder to ignore. When the days are shorter and energy fluctuates, the illusion of constant motivation falls apart. What’s left is the truth: motivation comes and goes, progress isn’t linear, and not all meaningful work needs an audience.

In that way, winter doesn’t sabotage change—it clarifies it.

Working With Winter Instead of Against It

These thoughts about productivity and winter first took shape in December of 2024, when I listened to a podcast featuring Kari Leibowitz, author of How to Winter. Inspired in part by how Nordic cultures relate to cold, dark seasons, her central idea is deceptively simple: winter isn’t a failure of conditions. The friction many of us feel comes from refusing to adjust—living and working as if nothing has changed.

That conversation stuck with me. Enough that I decided to read the book this winter. Reading it now has clarified something I hadn’t quite named before: it isn’t the cold or the short days that make winter difficult—it’s my expectations.

In places where winter is fully accepted, people don’t wait for ideal circumstances. Like the natural world, they adjust how they live, move, and work. Less emphasis on speed. More emphasis on steadiness. The work still happens—just differently.

Applied creatively, this mindset is liberating. Lower energy doesn’t mean lower value. Quiet work still counts. Showing up consistently—especially when conditions aren’t ideal—often matters more than bursts of intensity when everything finally feels aligned.

Winter as a Creative Season

There’s a difference between enduring a season and engaging with it. Endurance breeds resentment. Engagement builds resilience. Over time, it changes how you see the season itself.

For years, I struggled with motivation and energy in the winter. I treated these months like a problem to solve or a stretch to survive. A simple shift—seeing winter as a different kind of creative season—has changed how I show up to my work.

Winter is no longer a season for pushing or expanding. It’s a season for maintenance and preparation.

Winter work is mostly maintenance: a few minutes of daily practice, revisiting stalled composition projects, writing a few sentences instead of whole pages. It’s checking in, following up, and keeping relationships warm. None of it looks dramatic, but it keeps everything intact until energy and opportunity return.

I’ve also stopped punishing myself for feeling tired. I sleep a little more in winter. I still exercise. I still close my rings. But I understand that this is maintenance mode—keeping systems alive, habits intact, and ideas quietly warming on the sidelines. I’m also still getting outside, with winter walks and hikes whenever I can, no matter the weather.

Winter isn’t about growth for me—it’s about staying connected.

That shift matters more than it sounds. When winter becomes a valid creative phase—rather than a personal failure—its emotional weight changes. I feel less lethargic. Less frustrated. Less behind. Instead, I feel oriented. Steady. Quietly ready for what comes next.

The Shape of a Creative Reset

Winter work benefits from warmth and ease. Better light—not brighter, just better. Fewer distractions. No pressure to expand. This is a season for indoor work, settled into familiar spaces where the environment supports the work instead of demanding anything from it. The goal is simple: make it easy to begin.

It’s also a season to consume less and read deeper. I’m not looking to start anything new—just to maintain and dig further into existing ideas or stalled projects. Winter is when I check my systems: how I plan, how I take notes, how I manage my weeks. Instead of moving forward blindly, I examine inputs more carefully.

Practice defines what maintenance mode actually looks like. Winter practice means fundamentals and reps, not novelty. Staying in touch with loved ones without turning every connection into a scheduled event. Maintaining health and movement. Allowing time to recover after the wear and tear of the holidays.

Not everything needs to lead somewhere. The point is continuity, not progress charts.

Beginning Without Announcing It

Winter already imposes limits—short days, lower energy, narrower margins. Instead of fighting those limits, I’ve learned to use them.

Shorter work sessions. Fewer active projects. Narrow focus.

Winter resets protect continuity. Habits stay intact. Skills don’t erode. Ideas aren’t rushed or abandoned—they’re held. When energy and daylight return, you’re not starting from scratch. You’re resuming.

This approach also changes how winter feels. Without the pressure to reinvent or accelerate, the season becomes quieter and more manageable. You’re not behind. You’re aligned.

There’s a line by Igor Stravinsky that has stayed with me my entire life: the more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself. I carried that sentence for decades as a creative principle, and I’m now realizing it also applies here.

Winter doesn’t take freedom away—it supplies the constraints for us. Once you stop resisting them, those limits begin to clarify what matters and what doesn’t. The work becomes simpler, more contained, and easier to return to.

Once you adapt to winter, its limits stop feeling restrictive.

That’s enough to carry things forward for the season.

If you’d like to explore the roots of these ideas further, a few sources shaped this piece directly. The book How to Winter by Kari Leibowitz offers a deeper look at seasonal adjustment and mindset. The podcast conversation that first introduced me to her work helped clarify many of these ideas. And my earlier essay, January Walk, traces how this shift began for me in practice.

Links:

• Wintertime Mindset: How to Winter by Kari Leibowitz

• Podcast #1,046: The Winter Mindset — How Norwegians Love the Winter (And You Can Too)

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Most people don’t fail at homeownership because they’re careless.

They fail because they’re busy.

Homes don’t break all at once—they wear down quietly. A drip becomes a stain. A noise becomes a replacement. A forgotten repair becomes a surprise expense at exactly the wrong time.

The homeowners who seem to “have it together” aren’t necessarily more skilled or more obsessive. They’ve simply built a few small habits that keep them slightly ahead of their house instead of permanently reacting to it.

Here are five tiny habits—none glamorous, none expensive—that quietly make someone a better homeowner.

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1. Know Where the Big Shut-Offs Are

Every homeowner should physically locate three things:

• The main water shut-off

The electrical panel

• The gas shut-off (if applicable)

Once is enough. Once a year is better. Labeling them is best.

This isn’t about fear. It’s about preparedness.

When a plumber recently shut off the water to repair a toilet in my house, he immediately recommended replacing the old twist-style shut-off valve. I wasn’t surprised—I’ve already had several of these compression valves fail elsewhere in the house. What I hadn’t fully considered was the consequence: if that valve failed completely, I wouldn’t be able to shut the water off at all.

These older twist-style valves rely on rubber washers that dry out over time, especially if they haven’t been used in years. He replaced it with a quarter-turn ball valve—the lever-style shut-off that clearly shows whether water is on or off. It’s a small, inexpensive upgrade, but one that removes a common failure point before routine maintenance turns into an emergency.

In an emergency, you won’t suddenly become calm and capable—you’ll default to whatever you already know.

Five minutes of familiarity can prevent thousands of dollars in damage.

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2. Notice One Thing a Week

Once a week, notice one small thing about your home.

Not fix it.

Not research it.

Just notice it.

A new sound.

A slow drain.

A door that sticks.

A hairline crack that wasn’t there before.

That’s it.

Most major home problems don’t arrive as emergencies—they arrive as whispers. Water damage, HVAC failure, foundation issues, and appliance breakdowns almost always give advance notice. The problem isn’t ignorance; it’s inattention.

Make sure this habit includes spaces you don’t use every day. We have a basement bathroom that rarely gets used, and by the time we noticed a leak from an upstairs toilet, several months of water damage had already occurred. What could have been a small repair turned into a much larger fix simply because no one was regularly looking down there.

This habit trains your eye and ear. It turns the house from background scenery into something you’re gently aware of.

Early awareness is the cheapest form of home maintenance.

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3. Write One Sentence When Something Happens

Whenever something gets serviced, repaired, or replaced, write one sentence somewhere.

• “Water heater flushed – October 2025”

• “Roof leak patched near chimney – $250”

• “Dryer making noise again”

A notes app. An email to yourself. A notebook in a drawer. The format doesn’t matter. Consistency does. If there’s a receipt or work order, save it—or take a quick scan and add it to a notes app on your phone.

Homeowners rely far too much on memory, and memory is terrible infrastructure. Written notes create continuity—especially years later, when you’re trying to remember what was done, when, and by whom.

This habit is also a simple way to start building a Butler’s Book for your home—a single place to record anything and everything related to its care. I wrote more about that idea recently and will include links at the end if you want to explore it further.

Most importantly, this habit quietly builds trust. If you ever sell your home, clear records signal care and competence. Buyers don’t expect perfection—but they love evidence.

One sentence today prevents forgotten repairs, repeated work, and costly guesswork later.

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4. Spend 10 Minutes a Month Looking Ahead

Once a month, spend ten minutes asking one question:

What will future-me wish I had handled sooner?

That’s the whole exercise.

Maybe it’s checking a filter.

Maybe it’s scheduling a service three months out.

Maybe it’s looking up the lifespan of an appliance and realizing you’re closer to the end than you thought.

You’re not fixing everything—just nudging one small thing forward.

Homes punish procrastination but reward anticipation. This habit keeps maintenance from clustering into expensive, stressful weekends and spreads it into manageable moments.

Ten minutes of planning now can prevent emergency calls, rushed decisions, and expensive weekend fixes later.

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5. Treat Your House Like a System, Not a Backdrop

This is the quiet mindset shift behind all the others.

Instead of seeing your home as rooms and décor, start seeing it as a set of systems:

• Water

• Power

• Heat and air

• Structure

• Drainage

When something goes wrong, ask:

• What system does this belong to?

• What else depends on it?

• What usually fails next?

This reframing changes how you respond. Problems stop feeling personal or overwhelming. They become mechanical, understandable, and solvable.

Good homeowners don’t take breakdowns personally. They respond structurally.

When you understand the system, problems become manageable instead of stressful.

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Why Tiny Habits Matter

None of these habits are impressive.

None require special tools or expertise.

All of them compound over time.

Together, they:

• Reduce surprise repairs

• Lower long-term costs

• Make your home easier to sell

• Reduce the background stress that comes from feeling “behind”

The goal isn’t perfection.

It’s attentiveness.

Homes don’t need constant attention—but they do respond well to steady, small care. A few minutes here and there buys you time, clarity, and fewer unpleasant surprises.

And in homeownership, that’s most of the game.

Local note:

If you’re in New Jersey and want to talk through a real estate question, feel free to message me here.

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It’s cold. Really cold.

The snow is still falling from the night before. Visibility is about a mile, and it’s still coming down steadily. I’m walking in a wooded area on Staten Island, New York. I love this spot—close to home, yet remote at the same time. Walking in town is great this time of year too, especially early in the morning. School’s out, so no one is on the road. My walk to the county park is desolate. No cars. No rush. Just quiet. It’s amazing how quiet the city can be at this hour, once everything else has stopped.

Today, though, I decided to hit the trail in the fresh snow. Once I’m past the opening section, the human tracks disappear—just me and the animals out this far.

In winter, when there are no leaves to block the view, you can see all the way to the ocean from the high ground. It’s like the horizon leaps up to be seen from the forest. You can’t really appreciate it through a photo—you need to be here to understand the scale of it. Today, though, it’s just white snow and gray sky.

Christmas is over, but the new year hasn’t quite arrived. I’m in that gray area in between. There’s nothing urgent to plan for and no immediate deadlines pressing in. I have time before getting back to work. I love this stretch of the year, and it’s not like summer break. My wife and I are both teachers, and summer isn’t a paid vacation. We budget for it all year, and filling long summer days with trips and activities adds up quickly. Winter feels different. Quieter. Less demanding.

In these few days between Christmas and the New Year, there’s time to slow down and think. I reflect on the past year—what went well and what didn’t. I like the phrase taking stock because it covers everything.

I walk almost every day. Most weeks, I walk to and from school—about a mile each way. I have a treadmill, but I hate using it. Staring at the same wall isn’t the same. I need to move through space. Walking gives me room to think. I’m exercising, yes, but most of the time I’m on autopilot, letting my thoughts drift and settle. I used to mountain bike and loved it, but riding trails demands constant attention. Walking gives me something biking never did—space to notice where I am while I’m there.

On city walks, I usually listen to music or a book, stopping occasionally to take notes. In the woods—especially when I’m alone—I leave the earbuds out on purpose. When I stop moving and the crunch of snow under my boots falls silent, you can hear the forest breathe. The snow muffles everything. Today, the only sound is a small group of geese flying south somewhere off to the west. I find myself stopping just to stand there and listen to the silence. I really enjoy these walks, especially in winter.

Walking taught me that the calendar moves faster than I do.

There’s no need for me to make resolutions on January 1 and rush headlong back into work. I go back to school and I teach, but I plan the year ahead slowly. I take most of the first quarter to ease into it.

I used to slow down in winter and feel guilty about it. Somewhere along the way, I stopped treating that slowdown as a flaw and started seeing it as information. Winter isn’t taking something away—it’s narrowing my focus. Shorter days. Quieter streets. Fewer distractions. Less output, more orientation.

Walking fits the rhythm of winter. It’s not fast enough to feel productive and not slow enough to feel stalled. One step, then another. Breath visible. No rush to get anywhere beyond where I already am.

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When I first began to plan this essay, it had a very different title and direction: The Music Teacher’s Guide to Surviving the Holiday Concert Season. It carried the same energy as one of those survival manuals where the first rule is “Don’t panic,” and the second is “Keep your towel handy.”

But here’s the twist: this year, I didn’t have a holiday concert to survive.

The directive began with a concern at the high school level: too many incoming freshmen couldn’t read music at an eighth-grade level. The solution? Less performing — more teaching.

And with that, I found myself living in a parallel universe — one where December didn’t arrive with the usual spike in blood pressure.

A Typical December

Controlled chaos in festive wrapping.

December in a public school music program usually means one thing: controlled chaos disguised as festive community engagement. If you’ve never lived through a school concert season from the podium side, here’s the standard rundown:

• Putting musical band-aids on the parts students still can’t play.

• Rewriting parts on the fly to rescue kids who didn’t practice or missed too many lessons.

• Hoping and praying the beginners will somehow be ready for Hot Cross Buns.

• Moving 4 timpani, a concert grand marimba, a smaller marimba, a xylophone, a bell kit, a snare drum, a bass drum, several cymbals, a set of tom-toms, all their stands, a rolling percussion cabinet, a keyboard, and a rolling keyboard amp… from the basement to the first-floor stage. Oh — and 30–40 chairs and music stands.

• Securing the gym (our beloved gymatorium) for a few days of stage time.

• Teaching kids how to get on and off the stage.

• Preparing scripts for the student MCs.

• Finalizing the online program and printing posters with QR codes.

And that’s before concert day.

Concert day itself usually includes:

• Trying to warm up and tune the band, only to have them sit twenty minutes before going onstage.

• An AM rehearsal for 300–400 Pre-K through 3rd graders who cannot stay quiet for more than three minutes.

• An afternoon rehearsal for 400–500 older students who are fully capable of silence, but seldom interested in demonstrating it.

• A steady stream of emails about concert attire — even though the permission form went home two weeks earlier. (I won’t see those emails until the next day anyway; my laptop lives onstage running tracks and graphics.)

• The evening performance, hoping everyone shows up on time… and honestly relieved if they simply show up.

And, of course, the curveballs:

• A fire drill in the middle of tech rehearsal.

• Surprise: the entire 7th grade is on a field trip.

• Sarah’s cello fell over and is now in two pieces.

Last March, on the day of the spring concert, I tracked over 17,000 steps before I got home. It’s a wild day, every time. But somehow, the students always pull it together.

They rise to the moment.

They surprise you — and themselves.

And you walk out exhausted but proud, wondering how you survived another year.

The truth is, a concert doesn’t start in December. It starts in September. In our pull-out program, I don’t have a guaranteed class period. I make a lesson schedule and hope the kids show up. Preparing students for a performance takes months even with a consistent class. With pull-outs, it takes months — and nerves.

Professional musicians rehearse once and then perform for months. In schools, it’s the opposite: months of preparation for one single performance.

A December Without a Concert

The alternate universe of Winter 2025.

December is now halfway over, and I don’t miss the panic and mayhem that usually define these weeks. Going into this year, I was looking forward to a simple winter season. Instead of handing out holiday music during the first week of school, we spent time reviewing fundamentals and getting back into a consistent rhythm. I had time to assess each student more carefully, create skill-based groups instead of instrument-based ones, and hand out a wide variety of music. Some pieces we’ll perform, some we’ll practice, and some we’ll simply explore.

Without a looming deadline, a few things shift:

• You can pause and explain instead of plowing through material.

• You actually finish lesson plans instead of triaging them.

• Musicianship becomes a conversation, not a casualty.

• You notice subtle improvements usually lost in the December sprint.

• Absences don’t derail everything — even with my chaotic November (a break, an illness, and Thanksgiving), I only taught eight days last month.

I’m looking forward to a spring concert where students not only perform well, but know they’ve grown as musicians.

This year, instead of a looming performance, the goal is steady, ongoing progress.

Do We Perform Too Much?

The balance between practice and performance.

I’m not arguing to eliminate concerts — far from it. Performances matter. They build community, they motivate students, and they create memories.

When I taught high school, my Jazz Ensemble performed hour-long restaurant sets — twice in one night — before sitting down to their own feast at a local spot. We toured D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. We visited jazz clubs and heard artists like Jon Faddis, Jon Batiste, and Sean Jones. Those students needed the stage. Seeing professionals live pushed them to be better musicians.

But at the elementary level, it’s worth asking:

How many performances do we actually need?

And at what cost to instruction, pacing, and confidence?

I dislike glossing over essential concepts because a concert is a week away. And I’m lucky — I only teach instrumental music. Many colleagues teach both instrumental and general music. If a student misses a lesson for a math test, that’s it; the lesson is gone.

A winter concert can easily swallow four weeks of curriculum. That’s a month of reacting instead of shaping, rushing instead of deepening, rehearsing instead of learning.

Sometimes a strategic pause does more for a program than another performance opportunity.

Did I Miss It?

Honestly?

Yes and no.

I didn’t miss the logistics, the scrambling, the feeling of rehearsing on borrowed time, or the adrenaline spikes at 3 PM

But I did miss the proud faces, the applause that tells students, “You did it,” and the way kids stand a little taller afterward

Most of all, I missed the motivation a performance brings — especially for my more advanced musicians. If I had a guaranteed daily class where no one could opt out halfway through the year, I could sustain that energy internally. But with a pull-out program, kids don’t always show up. They’re juggling deadlines in other classes, and band becomes the thing they believe they can postpone indefinitely.

The beginners are thriving — consistent, motivated, showing up. The older students? They need the concert to make the work feel real.

I began the month convinced that skipping the winter performance wouldn’t affect me or my students. I was grateful for the breathing room. But I can’t teach the kids who aren’t in the room.

Teaching without the concert feels peaceful — and sometimes lonely.

Teaching with the concert feels electric.

Both have value.

Both teach something different.

What I’m Taking Into Next Year

Experiencing a December without a performance gave me something I didn’t know I needed: perspective. It reminded me that music programs thrive on balance — not nonstop performance cycles, not endless technique drills, but a rhythm between the two.

Next year, I want to protect more instructional time.

I want students to feel confident before they feel rushed.

I want concerts to feel like celebrations, not marathons.

And I want December to feel a little less like disaster management and a little more like music education.

Closing Reflection

This year, December didn’t roar — it whispered.

And in that quiet, I heard something I had forgotten:

Music doesn’t need an audience to matter —

but students need an audience to help motivate and inspire them.

Will the winter concert return next year? I hope so. I have some ideas that I think could strike a balance between teaching and performing and this break helped bring those ideas to light.

But this December? The stillness did us some good. It showed me that my students need real-world performance experiences — not to prove anything to the audience, but to help them feel like musicians.

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If this struck a chord, here are a few earlier posts you might enjoy. They circle around similar ideas—teaching, practice, reflection, and the habits that support creative work.

There’s something elegant about the way earlier generations handled complexity. Before complex notes apps and smart devices, households ran on a simple command center: the Butler’s Book (or Housekeeper’s Book). It lived in one place and held everything—contacts, instructions, maintenance routines, quirks, and reminders. It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked.

Fast forward to now. Our homes are far more complicated than the Victorian estates that inspired the idea, yet the information we rely on is scattered everywhere—emails, junk drawers, PDFs, scraps of paper, and our already-overloaded memory.

The old-world idea still works. In fact, it works better today. A modern Butler’s Book—digital, searchable, and simple—turns the chaos of homeownership into something you can actually manage.

Here’s what it once was, and what it can be now.

What the Butler’s Book Used to Be

Historically, the Butler’s Book was the household operations manual. The butler or housekeeper kept a running ledger that included:

• Vendors and household contacts

• Cleaning and maintenance routines

• Inventories

• Service logs

• Expenses

• Instructions for how the house functioned

It was the brain of the household—one authoritative place where every essential detail lived.

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How It Translates Today

The idea is the same, but the tools are better.

A modern Butler’s Book becomes the home for every useful detail you need to run your house. Not in your inbox. Not under a magnet on the fridge. Not in your head, which will inevitably forget the furnace model number the minute you need it.

Centralize it once and you’ll wonder why you didn’t do this years ago.

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Why Homes Need This Now

Today’s homes aren’t simple. We juggle:

• Smart devices

• Warranty deadlines

• Vendors we trust (and the ones we don’t)

• Wi-Fi networks, logins, codes

• Maintenance tasks that only show up with the seasons

A single home log saves time and cuts down the “Where did I put that?” frustration. It also creates a solid record for repairs, budgeting, insurance, seasonal routines, and future resale.

Well-documented homes don’t just feel better to live in—they carry more value. From the real estate side, buyers notice when a home has been cared for, and a maintenance log tells that story instantly.

Here’s what I keep in my own Butler’s Book.

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What Goes into a Modern Butler’s Book

I first learned about the Butler’s Book from a great podcast episode of The Art of Manliness. Since then, I’ve built my own version, adapted for real life (and a digital workflow). Here are the categories that matter most.

1. Home Infrastructure

• Furnace/boiler model numbers

• Water heater details

• Breaker panel map

• Filter sizes

• Paint colors by room

• Key measurements (windows, rooms)

2. Trusted Vendors & Contacts

• Plumber, electrician, HVAC, handyman

• Landscaper/snow removal

• Insurance agent

• Anyone you trust to touch your home

3. Appliances

• Model + serial numbers

• Digital manuals (I scan everything into PDFs)

• Warranty dates

• Service logs

• “If it acts up, try this first” notes

4. Finance & Logistics

• Insurance policy + renewal dates

• Utility account numbers

• Property tax schedule

• Seasonal or repeating expenses

5. Maintenance Routines

• Monthly checklist (filters, detectors, drains)

• Seasonal routines (winterizing, spring cleanup)

• Annual tasks

6. Household Systems

• Wi-Fi networks and passwords

• Office/desk info

• Pet details

• Emergency procedures

• Location of important documents

That looks like a lot. But you don’t do it all at once. You start with one or two categories and build from there.

When I created mine, I immediately wished I had tracked paint colors. One of our rooms had dark green walls with damage that needed touching up. You’d think matching a paint color would be easy in 2025. It isn’t. We ended up repainting the entire room. Now I keep the paint manufacturer, color name, store, and code for every room. Lesson learned.

Whether you own or rent, something on that list probably hit a nerve. A modern home creates friction. The Butler’s Book removes it.

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How I Keep Mine (Apple Notes + Reminders)

I use Apple Notes and Apple Reminders to run most of my life—and my Butler’s Book lives right alongside everything else. But any system will work: another app, a dedicated binder, or even pen and paper. Digital, however, just makes life easier.

Why digital works:

• Everything syncs across devices

• You can search instantly

• Photos, videos, documents, and links live in context

• Reminders automate recurring tasks

• It’s easy to maintain if your system is simple

I keep one main note that links to the important notes, and every related item gets the same #1-Household tag. No folders, no guessing where something should go. Add a note, tag it, done. The system stays organized because the rules stay simple.

This time of year, as I clean up my notes and plan for next year, I review what’s missing and update what matters. It’s the perfect moment to start your own Butler’s Book.

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Why the End of the Year Is Ideal

December and early January are prime time to build your system

• You’re already reflecting on the year

• Insurance renewals, receipts, and tax prep put info in front of you

• You’ve just lived through a full year of repairs and surprises

• “Reset mode” is already in gear

Start with a framework. Add three or four key pieces that are important to you. Walk around with your phone and take photos of everything: furnace, water heater, breaker panel, filters, appliances. Scan manuals. Log warranty dates.

Build momentum while the year is still fresh.

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A Real Estate Perspective

A well-documented home is easier to buy, easier to sell, and easier to maintain. Buyers appreciate maintenance logs, appliance details, measurements, paint colors, and vendor notes. It signals care—and that confidence affects how they feel about the entire property.

Speaking personally, I wish I had started mine when I bought my home back in 2002. It would have saved years of frustration and avoided some expensive mistakes.

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Your Home as an Instrument

A home runs like a musical ensemble: everything works better when the notes are clear and in their proper place. A Butler’s Book isn’t about being hyper-organized. It’s about reducing friction. It’s about capturing the important things once so you don’t have to relearn them every year.

Start small. Add one entry a week. By spring, you’ll have a working operating manual for your home—and a calmer mind.

If you want to go deeper, check out The Art of Manliness podcast, Episode 973, featuring Charles MacPherson, author of The Butler Speaks. It’s a great introduction to the original idea behind the Butler’s Book—and how to apply it today.

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I read Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method a few months ago, and I’ve been experimenting with a paper journal since July. It has completely changed how I think and plan—fully analog with paper and pen—and sent me down a rabbit hole of all things “BuJo.” In that research I found a video on Carroll’s YouTube channel: an interview with Anne-Laure Le Cunff about her book Tiny Experiments. I watched for about 15–20 minutes, got hooked, and ended up buying the book on Kindle.

Before I get into what Tiny Experiments is all about, here’s the thing that grabbed me immediately: there’s a reflection process she discusses called Plus-Minus-Next, and as soon as I tried it, I realized it was basically the same structure I’ve been using with my students for years called I Like, I Wish, What If.

Same framework, two different worlds. And it didn’t stop there. I noticed that even my own “Bridge Notes,” the little end-of-session reflections I jot down when working on a writing or composing project, follow the same pattern: what worked, what didn’t, and what needs to happen next. Apparently I’m drawn to the same cognitive move no matter what part of my life I’m working in—and it all works.

That insight, however, only made sense after sitting with the book itself.

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Tiny Experiments

In Tiny Experiments, Anne-Laure Le Cunff argues that instead of setting rigid, long-term goals, we should approach life like a scientist: run small, curiosity-driven experiments, observe what happens, and adjust. The book lays out a simple cycle—Pact, Act, React, Impact—and emphasizes using experiments to turn uncertainty into data. It’s practical, flexible, and, frankly, a relief for anyone tired of the pressure of traditional goal-setting.

I realized that, without knowing it, I’d already been running my own “tiny experiments”: two months of bullet journaling to see if the system fit my life and a multi-year commitment to real estate to see if it’s a path worth pursuing after retiring from education. Le Cunff goes deeper, though—into decision-making, the psychology of procrastination, and how to reframe disruption so it becomes something you dance with instead of dodge. That resonated with ideas I’d read in The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, where the authors compare life to a dance. I love when unrelated books echo each other like that.

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Plus-Minus-Next

One of the book’s simplest tools is the Plus-Minus-Next reflection:

• Plus: What went well

• Minus: What didn’t

• Next: What needs to happen going forward

It’s perfect for weekly or monthly reviews and flexible enough for a single project, a single day, or a full year. It’s also a clean way to think about intentions—a concept Carroll emphasizes in The Bullet Journal Method—instead of traditional goal-setting.

Carroll distinguishes between goals and intentions: goals assume you can predict the future, while intentions give you a direction to move in. Intentions are flexible; they let you adjust as you learn, which makes them a perfect match for tiny experiments. You’re not chasing a fixed outcome—you’re testing your way forward.

The Plus-Minus-Next framework works for reflecting on a project, a tiny experiment, or your day-to-day life. But it also works for critique and assessment, and that’s the connection I didn’t see right away—how the same structure had been sitting in my teaching all along.

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I Like, I Wish, What If?

One of my mentors introduced me to a critique structure that I still use with my students today: I Like, I Wish, What If. It works for performance feedback and teaches students how to reflect and critique with respect and musical insight.

A typical example:

• I like the evidence of practice—you play with a beautiful tone.

• I wish the performance was more in time with the beat; the pulse wasn’t steady.

• What if you tried writing in the counts and practicing with a metronome? Or using the practice recordings online to help you lock in?

I have my students use it with each other, too. We talk about what I call the “elements of performance”—tone, beat, accuracy, dynamics, articulation, blend and balance, expression. I often group these into the four “T’s” suggested by Eugene Migliaro Corporon: In-Time, In-Tone, In-Tune, In-Touch. (The progression is intentionally out of order here. While Corporon suggests focusing on tone first, I find that my younger students need to focus first on rhythm and steady beat, with tone developing over longer periods of time and practice.)

I also add a fifth layer of “T’s”: In-Tech for technique, which is also placed right between time and tone. Students have to go through the I Like/I Wish process with these elements of performance in mind and have to address at least one of them when giving feedback.

The What If part is the toughest, though—kids don’t always know how to fix their issues—so in the beginning I have them only do the I Like and I Wish parts. If they can identify what’s good and what needs fixing, using musical vocabulary, the battle’s half over, and I jump in and help guide them on the What If.

Honestly, adults aren’t much better at this step when it comes to “What’s next?” This is why the tiny experiments idea fits so neatly. Once you know what worked and what didn’t, you can generate small tests to figure out how to move forward. You don’t need a teacher standing over your shoulder to guide the process; some experiments will work, some might not. Either way, you’re learning and moving forward.

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The Year Ahead

As the year winds down, Plus–Minus–Next becomes a useful lens for looking back—one last pass through what worked, what didn’t, and what might come next. It’s the kind of reflection that naturally leads into setting intentions rather than rigid goals for the new year.

Every December I find myself doing a version of this anyway: noticing how quickly the year passed, how much my granddaughter has grown, what I managed to move forward, and what I let slide. Instead of setting hard goals for 2026, I plan to set a few intentions and support them with tiny experiments, letting the process uncover the path rather than predicting it.

So this month, my intention is simple: look closely at the past year and decide where I want to point my attention in the next.

That’s the hidden rhythm of reflection—looking back just long enough to decide how to move forward.

How will you move your life forward in the year ahead?

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My trumpet mouthpiece - Denis Wick 3 - the first tool.

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My brother is notorious for cleaning his plate. Doesn’t matter what he eats or where—when he’s finished, his plate looks as if it had just come out of the dishwasher. When anyone comments on this feat, he simply holds up his knife and fork and utters, in his husky voice: “Tools of the Trade.”

And he’s not wrong. No matter what you’re doing in life, the tools you use—and your ability to use them—make all the difference. And when you really know how to use them, it’s what I refer to as eating dinner. Because once the basics disappear into muscle memory, the real work becomes expression, judgment, and taste—the same way a good meal is more than the act of chewing.

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Eating Dinner

(why mastery feels effortless)

This phrase came from my college trumpet professor, Dr. William “Prof” Fielder. He used to say that when you’re playing the trumpet, it should ideally feel like eating dinner: you don’t think about it; you just do it. The mastery is so ingrained that the action becomes effortless. I’ve always thought of eating dinner as the Wu Wei of music practice—the point where years of focused work turn into effortlessness.

Cleverness tries to devise craftier and craftier ways of making pegs fit where they don’t belong. Wu Wei doesn’t try. It doesn’t think about it. It just does it. And when it does, it doesn’t appear to do much of anything. But things get done.— Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

(a book my trumpet professor made all of us read)

These ideas set the stage for this post: the tools I use every day to teach, create, think, and work.

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Tools I’ve Used Long Enough to Forget I’m Using Them

(the kitchen I know by heart)

I have been teaching instrumental music for the past 34 years. The set of tools I use for teaching isn’t close to what I used when I started—many of them didn’t even exist at that time—but it’s been a natural progression of tools and skills that have been sharpened and honed over the years.

Before any of these digital tools existed, my first real tool was my trumpet—a B-flat Vincent Bach medium-large bore that has served me well my entire life. When I played more professionally, I kept a small arsenal: a C trumpet, a flugelhorn, even a piccolo. These days it’s just the Bb. As a music teacher I can play enough of the other instruments to get students started, but the trumpet is the only one I play professionally. It’s the tool that shaped my ear, my musicianship, and the way I think about sound itself.

I started arranging music for high school ensembles in the late 80s while still in college and studied composition as an undergrad Music Ed major with some amazing teachers—even though my school didn’t offer undergrad courses in composition. I’ve arranged for bands, composed for choirs, and more recently started publishing my own music and teaching resources. The tools I use to compose, remarkably, have not changed much since the late 80s. While they’re more feature-rich and far easier to use now, their core purpose hasn’t changed.

These are the tools I know the way a chef knows the weight of their favorite knife.

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Teaching Music

(mise en place for the classroom)

First the basics—the tools I use to stay organized. The first skill any new teacher needs to learn is classroom management, and at the core of that is organization. Good teaching is mostly mise en place. If the ingredients are prepped and the tools are where they belong, class feels effortless. If not, everything burns.

I use Google Sheets to keep track of student contact information, instrument inventory, and communications. I’ve built custom spreadsheets that cross-reference the data for the 80–100+ students I teach each year with our school’s 100+ instruments, and another that automatically pulls parent emails, teacher contacts, and phone numbers into a dated communication log. I send 50–75 emails a week about missed lessons, scheduling issues, or reminders, and the spreadsheet makes it easy to document everything.

Within my classroom I have a teaching station with a projector, a Bluetooth receiver attached to an old-school stereo system, and a blackboard. Yes—a blackboard with chalk. I also have a Korg MicroKey Air Bluetooth keyboard that allows me to play tones from wherever I may be within the room—reference pitches, melody lines, and so on. I pair that with my iPhone or iPad running the TonalEnergy Tuner app.

Next, the materials I use to teach—the stuff the kids see and interact with every day. I teach pull-out lessons, which means my students don’t have a consistent scheduled time to see me each week, so it’s important that I have ways to communicate with them and provide online resources for at-home practice. Google Slides and Google Drive—presented through our Google Classroom—are the backbone of my flipped-classroom setup. My Slides hold warm-ups, videos, recordings, fingering charts, and short explanations students can use when practicing at home. Instead of handing out papers they’ll lose in five minutes, I put everything in one place on a shared drive they can actually find.

Google Video is a newer tool I’ve added. Since you can’t give a written test on musicianship, the only real way to assess young players is by hearing them perform. Google Video gives me a reliable way to hear students individually and offer real feedback.

Boomcards lets students learn note names, vocabulary, and fundamentals through interactive decks and games. The metrics—accuracy, errors, response time—help me see exactly where a kid is struggling.

Canva handles posters, concert programs, flyers, QR-code handouts, and simple visuals for concerts. My phone and iPad fill in the rest: tuner, metronome, audio player, recorder, digital scores, reference materials.

Because I’ve been using versions of these tools for over three decades, teaching feels like eating dinner—familiar, practiced, steady. The tools just make the work smoother.

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Composing – Sibelius + Logic

(the burners I always keep lit)

For composing, arranging and recording, I rely on two primary tools: Sibelius and Logic.

Sibelius is where anything destined for print lives. Logic is for mock-ups and recordings (and composition if it’s an electronic music piece). ComposerCloud gives me access to professional sound libraries that help make demos convincing. Most of the time the NotePerformer plugin for Sibelius is enough, but when I need a more polished demo, I export raw MIDI to Logic and assign the pro libraries.

These tools are so familiar they’re basically muscle memory—chopping onions with your eyes closed.

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Performing & Conducting – iPad Pro + ForScore

(my portable kitchen counter)

ForScore on my 11-inch iPad Pro handles score reading, practice, and performance. Paired with a Bluetooth page turner, it’s flexible and portable—big enough to read comfortably, small enough to carry everywhere. My 11 inch iPad is small for scores, but by the time I’m conducting a performance, most of the score is memorized anyway.

My teaching and composing tools are the ones I’ve spent my whole life sharpening. These were the tools of my first kitchen. But the tools that helped me think—the ones that kept the rest of my life from boiling over—came much later.

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Where the Ideas Simmer

(journaling, reading, note-taking)

When I went back to school for my master’s degree at 45, I realized something surprising: I was a far better student in my forties than I had ever been in my twenties. Part of that was maturity, sure—but most of it came down to tools. I had finally learned how to think, how to study, how to retain what mattered, and how to build systems that kept my life from boiling over. These tools didn’t help me teach or compose; they helped me stay clear-headed enough to do both.

Journaling – Bullet Journal + DayOne

(my slow-cook tools)

I recently shifted to planning my days, weeks, and months on paper after reading Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method. I’d always assumed bullet journaling was too decorative—turns out, the real method is simple, bare-bones, and incredibly effective. My notebook is part planner, part reflection, part memory dump. Ink on paper clears my head in a way digital tools never fully did.

I use Apple Notes for quick captures during the day, but the deeper thinking happens in the journal. I also use DayOne—with over 4,000 entries from 2008 onward—but it’s more a memory vault and a place to reflect where my journal is my workhorse for planning. There’s a bit of an overlap, but I’m still honing the paper journal.

Reading – Kindle, Audible, & Readwise

I read through Kindle, usually listen through Audible, and buy physical books when they matter. Readwise captures all my highlights and syncs everything into Apple Notes.

Note-Taking – Apple Notes

I’ve used digital notes since Evernote’s first iPhone version. Years of hopping across platforms eventually led me back to Apple Notes. With the ForeverNotes framework for Apple Notes, I tag everything, link related notes to each other and a few main hubs, and let Apple Notes’ built in smart folders and structure do the work.

After decades of experimenting, this is the simplest, most stable system I’ve ever had.

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Learning to Hold the Spoon

(tools for real estate and building a second career)

Real estate is a new kitchen entirely. Some days I feel like the baby in those photos learning to eat for the first time—motivated, messy, and occasionally wearing the spoon.

Learning new tools feels a lot like this: motivated, messy, and occasionally dropping the spoon.

Real Estate Tools – MLS, CMAs, Systems

Much of my time is spent learning the systems the business runs on. The MLS is powerful but dense—filters, codes, acronyms, buttons that behave in ways I’m still discovering. I practice by running searches, analyzing neighborhoods, watching what sells, and building CMAs.

BHHS Tools – Marketing & Communication

The Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices platform (BHHS) connects directly to our MLS data and can autofill marketing materials. It’s clean and efficient, even if the CRM side is clunky. I’m slowly building my database, writing monthly newsletters, and working the social media side—an uncomfortable but necessary part of the work.

Marketing Tools – Social Media & Beyond

Everything I’ve read says: don’t just post open houses. Share yourself. This Substack is part of that process—thinking in public, learning through writing, figuring out what resonates. And I’m realizing something important: good marketing isn’t limited to selling homes. It helps me share compositions, teaching resources, and anything else I want to bring into the world.

These tools don’t just support a second career; they support both of my careers.

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Dessert

Every tool I’ve mentioned—analog or digital, old habit or new experiment—serves the same purpose: keeping the different parts of my life in balance. Teaching, composing, journaling, real estate, the never-ending stream of planning and communicating… none of it works without systems that keep me grounded and moving.

But the tools themselves aren’t the point. They’re just utensils. Mastery doesn’t come from finding the perfect app or the perfect notebook or the perfect software. It comes from using what you have until the action feels natural, until the mechanics disappear and the work becomes something like eating dinner.

That balance—steady, unforced, sustainable—is the dessert. The part you get to enjoy after the years of figuring out how to hold the fork correctly. When the tools stop being tools and just become extensions of how you think, teach, create, and live.

That’s the goal I’m working toward every day. And with the right tools—used well—I’m getting closer.

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Toward the end of the summer I bought a new outboard engine. I still needed to put a few more hours on it before the first big twenty-hour service. Winter is coming. The deadline was closing in; I needed to get a few more hours on the engine and schedule the 20 hour service before hauling the boat out of the water.

My wife and I had planned a Sunday cruise up the Hudson River to see the fall foliage, but the forecast called for a small craft advisory — three- to five-foot waves in the harbor. My wife had lessons on Saturday, and the sudden change of plans ruled out a proper fishing trip, so that morning I decided to go anyway — a solo run up the Hudson from New York Harbor to the Palisades. The plan was simple: get three to five more hours on the motor and enjoy the last of the fall color before the season shut down. On the fly, I made another impromptu plan — to use an old app I had recently rediscovered to take some photos. Instead of catching fish, I’d photograph the scenery.

The week before, I’d been setting up my phone and iPads with the new iOS 26 software — going through old apps, updating focus settings and home screens, just some digital housekeeping. In the process, I rediscovered an old favorite: Hipstamatic. I hadn’t opened the app in years. Back when it first appeared, its square format and virtual lenses, films, and flashes made taking photos feel revolutionary — a way to make digital photography fun and artistic again. That’s the app that inspired me to I take some photos of this solo voyage.

What Is Hipstamatic?

Hipstamatic first appeared in 2009, long before filters were built into every social platform. Developed by brothers Lucas and Ryan Allen under Synthetic LLC (later Hipstamatic LLC), the app borrowed its name and mythology from a fictional 1980s toy camera — the Hipstamatic 100. (Wikipedia)

The app invited users to choose a virtual lens, film, and flash — digital stand-ins for physical tools — and commit to them before taking a shot. Each combination produced a distinct mood: some warm and saturated, others cool and grainy. You never quite knew what you’d get until the image “developed.”

For me, that unpredictability felt like a return to film’s surprise. I remember taking photos and waiting days to pick them up from the drugstore. Half the pictures were awful, but there were always a few gems in the roll. Hipstamatic’s photos didn’t look like the crisp, perfect images of the new smartphone era. They looked lived-in — slightly off, nostalgic, tactile. That became its aesthetic signature.

Original photo with regular iPhone camera is in the upper left quadrant - all others are Hipstamatic variations.

I rediscovered the new Hipstamatic just a few days before my trip. This version incorporates a bit of “AI”, scanning your photo and applying filters automatically using complex algorithms, though I don’t find that feature to be very accurate — I’m still experimenting. Fortunately, you can still go full manual and choose your own lens, film, and flash. Before deciding on that Saturday cruise, I was already enjoying the new features and looking forward to putting them to work on the river.

When an iPhone Beat the Pros

In 2010, New York Times photojournalist Damon Winter used Hipstamatic to document soldiers in Afghanistan. The resulting series, A Grunt’s Life, won awards — and sparked controversy. Could an image filtered through an app be considered legitimate journalism, or was it art?

Winter defended his choice. The iPhone allowed him to photograph moments of intimacy that his professional DSLR could not. The soldiers were already using their own phones to capture images, and the smaller device helped them feel more relaxed. The Hipstamatic filters, he argued, gave those moments a visual language that matched their emotional tone. There were no algorithms choosing for him — only his own decisions about film, lens, and light. Does the fact that he chose to use virtual tools instead of real ones somehow undermine its authenticity?

His work blurred the line between tool and vision — a line we’ve been crossing ever since. Each new technology brings us back to the same question: what makes something art — the tool, or the hand that holds it?

What Makes It Art?

Hipstamatic allows the user to create strikingly artistic images on the fly — or “from the hip,” a nod to the app’s encouragement of spontaneous, candid photography. Its virtual lenses, films, and flashes each add something distinct to a photograph and can be combined in countless ways — thousands of possible pairings, each with its own character and mood.

When used in automatic mode, it’s fascinating to watch how the algorithm chooses its preset filters — though it doesn’t always get it right. In manual mode, however, the artistry shifts back to the photographer. You still need to understand how each lens or film will alter light and tone, and you must choose them before pressing the shutter. (Yes, you can still make adjustments afterward.)

In essence, Hipstamatic compresses the craft of Photoshop and the complexity of digital photography into an app that works on the fly.

But does that make the result less authentic — or more? The nostalgia of Hipstamatic gestures toward a physical past, yet the image exists only in pixels. Perhaps that tension is the point. The frame doesn’t fake authenticity; it reminds us that all seeing is filtered — by technology, by memory, by mood. And if everyone has access to the same tools, can anyone make art?

Art has never been about exclusivity; it’s about awareness. The line between a snapshot and a work of art may come down to a single act of intention — the decision to see something that speaks to you and place it within the frame. If an artist can sell an invisible sculpture for millions of dollars — as in the case of Italian artist Salvatore Garau’s 2021 Io Sono (“I Am”) — why can’t anyone with an iPhone create digital art?

Since that trip, and in the few weeks that have passed while experimenting with this app, I’ve found myself framing the world differently — not just through the camera, but in daily life. Hipstamatic isn’t changing how I take pictures; it’s changing how I see, reminding me that art isn’t separate from the everyday — it’s a way of paying attention.

My Voyage and (Some of) My Photos

By the time I returned to my slip, I’d taken almost a hundred photographs — some on the regular iPhone camera, some through Hipstamatic. Some of the filters I chose were amazing; it truly felt like I was creating art, not just snapping photos from the hip.

Comparing them later, the difference wasn’t just technical — it was emotional. It reminded me of something Robert Pirsig discussed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He describes two ways of seeing the world: the classical, which looks at how things are built — the systems, the mechanics, the order — and the romantic, which sees how things appear: the surface, the immediate experience of beauty.

The app doesn’t just help us take pictures; it helps us see differently. It shifts the gaze from analytical to emotional, from the measurable to the felt. The world remains the same, but the app helped me glimpse it from a slightly altered angle — less factual, more poetic. Maybe that’s its quiet genius. It reminds us that art isn’t always about accuracy. Sometimes it’s about attunement — seeing the ordinary world through a lens that lets the mystery show through.

As it becomes easier to create, the question isn’t what tool you used, but what you used it for. Every creative act — whether in music, photography, or writing — lives somewhere between craft and choice.

Conclusion

While working on this piece, I edited it with AI assistance — drafting, refining, and proofreading — which brings me back to that same question: if Hipstamatic doesn’t invalidate photography (and some will say that it does), does AI invalidate writing? Does the use of digital tools in creating music make it any less creative?

I don’t believe so. Digital tools expand what’s possible; they don’t decide what’s meaningful. The art, if it exists, lives in the choices we make — when to click the shutter, which musical phrases to discard, what story to tell.

In the end, it’s all the same pursuit. Whether you’re making music, taking photos, or writing essays on a Sunday night, the goal is to see more clearly — to catch the moment before it passes.

If a tool helps you do that — if it helps you see or hear differently and create — then I say use it. Create with it. See where it takes you.

About This Piece

This essay began as a test run — part maintenance trip, part fall escape — a solo voyage up the Hudson to put a few final hours on my new outboard engine before putting the boat up on blocks for the winter. Somewhere between the Palisades and New York Harbor, I rediscovered Hipstamatic, the old iPhone photo app that once made digital pictures feel analog again. The photos I took that day, and the questions they raised about art, tools, and perception, became this piece.

It’s also a reflection on what happens when an artist — or anyone — learns to see differently, whether through a lens, a boat engine, or a bit of code.

Notes & Links

• Hyperallergic.com: iPhone Photojournalism Causes Aesthetic Controversy — great article about the debate over Hipstamatic and authenticity.

• Poynter: Damon Winter explains process and philosophy behind award-winning Hipstamatic photos.

• TechCrunch: Hipstamatic’s Relaunch — the 2023 reboot.

• Artnet: Italian Artist Auctions ‘Invisible Sculpture’ for $18,300.

• The Art of Manliness Podcast #994: A Guide to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — an excellent discussion of the book — although I disagree with some of the author’s views on Persig’s ideas.

• Life in LOFI: Q&A: Hipstamatic — The Story Behind the Plastic App with the Golden Shutter.

Middle Management and the Music Room

Being a music teacher is tough. It’s like being in middle management. It’s a “special subject”; the most important thing I do all day is give a prep to one of the third-grade teachers between pull-out instrumental lessons. Administrators have too many other things to worry about, so music education often gets pushed aside. I’ve worked in the office as Admin in Charge for the building after school and have seen firsthand what principals have to deal with every day.

Last year, all specials—art, music, dance, gym, and computers—were canceled from after spring break through the end of May for state testing. We spent those weeks on “gang preps,” supervising large groups of students in the gym while others tested. Counting spring break, it added up to ten weeks of missed classes. By the time we reconvened, it was June, two and a half weeks before summer break. We’d lost an entire trimester of teaching.

Part of me wanted to rant, to write emails, to try and fix it. But that would be pointless. It’s not my problem to fix. Like any middle manager, I don’t control the whole operation—but I can control how I show up for the students I serve.

As someone who tries to live by Stoic principles, I remind myself that situations like this are beyond my control. I wasn’t always this way. I used to overreact and get angry. For what? — Administrators face their own pressures; their tasks simply differ from mine. Once you see that clearly, frustration loosens its grip.

Kishimi and Koga, authors of The Courage to Be Disliked, would call this task separation: recognizing where my responsibility ends and another’s begins. The frustration doesn’t vanish, but it becomes manageable. And that, I think, is one of the central lessons in The Courage to Be Disliked: that all problems are, in one way or another, interpersonal relationship problems—and that many of them become lighter once we learn to separate our own tasks from everyone else’s.

All Problems Are Interpersonal Relationship Problems

The Courage to Be Disliked expands Alfred Adler’s idea that most human suffering comes not from circumstances but from our relationships with others. It’s an uncomfortable premise: our problems rarely come from the world itself—they arise from how we measure ourselves against the expectations of others.

Told through a dialogue between a philosopher and a young man, the book wrestles with what it means to live without being weighed down by judgment—our own or anyone else’s. The philosopher insists that freedom begins when we stop trying to manage other people’s reactions and focus only on our own tasks. The young man resists: If I don’t care what others think, won’t I become selfish? Irresponsible? That tension—between caring and control—runs through every chapter.

For me, this idea of separating tasks landed hardest and made a direct connection with the Stoic teaching of control. The Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote: It is not in our control to have everything turn out exactly as we want, but it is in our control to choose how we respond to what happens. That’s a core idea I’ve tried to incorporate into my own life for years.

In education, you can’t control how much a student practices, how a parent prioritizes the arts, or how an administrator schedules testing. Your task is to teach, to show up, and to care—without trying to manage everyone else’s responsibilities. It’s not that I don’t care about these issues. I can encourage children to practice and urge parents to value the arts, but I can’t make them care—that’s their task. When you stop taking on other people’s tasks, you start conserving energy for your own.

That’s not easy work. We’re trained to fix, guide, and intervene. But Adler’s challenge, echoed here, is to let go of the illusion of control over others. That doesn’t mean apathy; it means trust—that each person’s growth, like each student’s practice, is their own task, not mine.

When I think back to those “gang prep” weeks now, I see less wasted time and more of a lesson in restraint. I can’t control a system built around test scores, but I can control how I use the time I do have with my students—to make those moments feel alive again. That’s the quiet courage this book points toward: the courage to stop fighting every battle and start tending your own garden.

The Cost of Freedom

Reading The Courage to Be Disliked reminded me that freedom always carries a cost. We like to imagine it as the absence of limits—a life lived on our own terms—but Kishimi and Koga suggest something subtler and far more demanding. True freedom means letting go of the need to be approved of, even by ourselves.

The philosopher writes:

“It is certainly distressful to be disliked. If possible, one would like to live without being disliked by anyone. One wants to satisfy one’s desire for recognition. But conducting oneself in such a way as to not be disliked by anyone is an extremely unfree way of living, and is also impossible. There is a cost incurred when one wants to exercise one’s freedom. And the cost of freedom in interpersonal relationships is that one is disliked by other people.”

That passage captures the book’s essence. The courage to be disliked isn’t about self-rejection; it’s about ending the constant performance for approval. It’s accepting that both freedom and authenticity require a tolerance for discomfort. If the cost of freedom is being disliked by others, the cost of inner freedom is learning to live without constant self-recognition.

For me, that turns the idea of courage inside out. It’s not bravado; it’s humility. It’s the willingness to keep acting according to your principles even when it earns silence instead of applause. In that sense, the courage to be disliked becomes the courage to live freely, without waiting for validation—from others or from the mirror.

And maybe that’s the truest form of independence: to act from conviction, not consensus; to keep showing up for your work, your students, your clients, and your life—even when the world isn’t watching.

The courage to be disliked is the courage to stand still amid the noise—to stop polishing the self and start listening for harmony. To let the world play its part while you quietly play yours.

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I’ve worn a lot of hats in my life. For most of it, I stood in front of classrooms and ensembles, teaching music while dabbling in composition and arranging. But I’ve also pumped gas at a marina. I spent years learning the trade as a carpenter’s apprentice. And for a stretch, I worked nights and weekends in New York Harbor, tying up oil tankers under the glow of dock lights before returning to teach by day.

I’ve lived on both ends of the spectrum: the grit of long hours in physical labor and the quiet reflection of intellectual work. Each role taught me something different, and together they’ve shaped the way I think and act.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become a better student. In my forties I went back to school for a master’s degree in composition—something I wasn’t ready for fresh out of college. These days I read history, philosophy, and even tech books for fun, filling pages with notes and highlights. I’m learning now more than ever. Most recently, after thirty-three years in the classroom and on the podium, I took a leap of faith. I passed the New Jersey real estate exam and began work as a Realtor.

On the surface, none of these roles seem connected. But for me, they circle around the same question: how to build a meaningful life through art, work, family, and community.

As a teacher who is getting ready to retire, I am looking to focus on my new career in Real Estate, but I also want to spend more time creating and publishing music and teaching resources. I want to start exploring all of these threads with more focus and detail to prepare myself for that next phase in my life. This space is where those threads will come together. I’ll be writing and thinking out loud about:

• Lessons from music and teaching

• Reflections on real estate and how our homes and community shape us

• Ideas from books, philosophy, and culture

• The pursuit of meaning in everyday life

I don’t see these as separate worlds. Music teaches discipline and expression. Real estate, at its best, is about belonging and helping people find a place to call home. Philosophy grounds us when life pulls in different directions. Together, they’re all part of the same search: how to live well.

If that resonates with you, I’d love for you to join me here. This isn’t about self-promotion or sales pitches — it’s about conversation, creativity, and reflection. Maybe, along the way, we’ll find a little more clarity together.

Thanks for being here. Let’s see where this goes.

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