Music is not only an ornament but a necessity to the Courtier.
Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier
I once had an interesting discussion about creativity with my friend, a game music composer from Sweden. Until then I saw creativity as something wild, huge, and crazy, that allows you to just do anything and everything. His opinion changed my perception in an quite original direction.
“You know, if you want to compose something, you start with the very opposite of creativity – you start by setting limits,” he said. “Once you know what era you are in, what music scale you decide to use, which instruments do you prefer, and what feelings you want to convey, you can finally start putting together a piece that actually makes sense. Without these limitations, it’s not only difficult to start, it’s even more difficult to be actually, like, you know, creative. This finally allows you to stop gliding on the surface and dive deeper. And that deep-dive is quite difficult without setting some constraints, without knowing or defining some rules.”
The Music
Beautiful, steady, soothing. The calming sound of the wheels hitting the tracks with a steady frequency was the first emotion that I noticed. Well-paced, firm, yet fast and stimulating.
My mind slowly started to perceive my surroundings, yet I deliberately kept my eyes shut. I slowly started recalling moments from the previous day. Everything seemed to be so far, far away. The heavy, endless steps, falling on the cold streets of the city of Moscow. The weight of my backpack, leaving red marks on my shoulders. The shallow taste of the cheap cheeseburger. The smell of the wind on the train platform. The ringing color of Berta 1’s endless yammering. Few exchanged words with Tatiana in my crude Chinese. All these memories, somehow stored in my mind, grayish in color and far in distance, thanks to more than 10 hours of sound sleep.
I was ready for the new. I wanted to breath in a whole explosion of experiences and emotions. I opened my eyes, ready for all those new impulses.
I tasted the rather dry air.
I touched the linen, still firm from starch.
I saw the light, gently falling on the texture of the train wall.
I heard muffled words, occasionally interrupted with giggles.
I smelled instant coffee.
Nothing, absolutely nothing felt amazing.
Each one of these impulses was extremely limited in the “wow-factor”, but after letting them linger in the air, I started to figure out a profound quality and depth, that was not quite there before. The limitation principle working in real life was amazing. The context was different and fresh.
I looked outside of the window and saw an army of birch trees, covered with snow, tirelessly marching from right to left.
I slowly sat up and said hello to the two ladies sitting on the bench below me.
They smile and throw a casual “доброе утро” and “早上好” back at me.
I climb down my bed, say hello again, make a short re-introduction as I was not sure if I told them my name the day before. Berta 2 offers me a cup of instant coffee and starts mixing one for herself as well. I smile as I see her putting three teaspoons overflowing with sugar in her cup. She catches my gaze and responds with a simple:
“Миша, без сахара не могу!” (Michael, I can’t do without sugar!)
We smile, and start to communicate. For some reason quite unknown to the universe, Berta 2 thinks that I can understand Russian (worse than poorly) and Tatiana thinks that my Chinese is good enough to talk about life.
Anyway, Tatiana translates my crude Chinese into Russian, Berta 2 responds in a lively Russian, and those parts that I don’t understand (~87%) are translated by Tatiana back into Chinese. The rest (~50%) is either conveyed by Chinese characters Tatiana tirelessly writes in my diary, or lost in translation. Not that it would matter, we are having fun.
Berta 2, whose actual name is Luboslava, comes from a Russian/Bulgarian family and is on her way to visit her good friend near Irkutsk and spend some time with her. A widow from her 50s, her only current dream is that her 3 children (born in 1981, 1983, and 1987 in case you wonder) are happy. Actually it was her 3 children that bought her a ticket to travel a little bit. The next stop is to take a trip to Sevastopol.
Just for a second, I try to imagined how would my mother look like if I gave her a ticket to a small village in the middle of Siberia. But I guess that the context in case of Luboslava is slightly different. I hope.
Tatiana mentions that she was a banker, then worked at a library, and now she is studying Chinese. I feel that there is more to her story, but maybe it’s just way too soon.
They both look at me, wanting me to explain what it is that I do. To be honest I have never had so much fun trying to explain management consulting in a combination of Russian and Chinese. I have this lingering feeling that until today the think they have met someone who works as a doctor and a financial analyst, which I still see as being in the ballpark.
Luboslava opens her travel bag and starts putting out her food rations: bread, Moldavian cheese, candies, nuts, butter, boiled eggs, sausage. The small table is doing its best not to break apart under the weight of the food, yet Luboslava doesn’t stop there – she starts to prepare another mug of instant coffee. This time she doesn’t even ask and puts 3 heavily loaded teaspoons of sugar into my cup (“Миша, вкусный!”).
We chat for another hour and I decide to go to the restaurant car to have a beer and a bit of solitude.
What awaits me is a wild combination of Russian 90s disco-pop, a LCD touchscreen, a bored waiter, and, well, nothing else.
It’s perfect.
The waiter approaches me after few minutes and asks me if I want something.
I answer “Beer”, and he brings me a cold can of Baltika and a nice glass cup.
I open up my diary, pour a bit of beer into the cup, and start writing whatever comes to my mind.
The points of view
It’s amazing to simply think about how this bored waiter and I see this very situation very differently.
For him, it’s most probably just another day in the work. Maybe his wife is angry for coming late the other day, maybe the little pesky kids won’t stop nagging to get them something they’ve seen in the TV. Or maybe he doesn’t have any family and he doesn’t think about his situation at all. He seems to be simply bored.
For me, this restaurant car is a symbol of change, new impulses, inputs. I’m high on expectations, on trying out things, on flying. But is it really relevant? If so much depends on chance, does it make even sense to try to experience specific things?
Maybe a rich life is not about the specific set of experiences that people have to go through. Maybe it’s about the spectrum and order of experiences that people can then fit inside their life framework. And this simple framework differs, person from person.
People have this feeling that they have to experience something, they have to fulfill their dreams, expectations, passions. But all these dreams, expectations, and passions are merely defined by the current framework, by their current frame of mind. Any random experience can completely destroy this framework, make them meaningless, hollow. In the most extreme case, any experience can become meaningless.
Does this mean that people should not dream or strive to do things? No. They push people into new positions, prevent them from stagnating, they enable them to see more and feel more. Some people have to be in a painful position – being satisfied by experience (“I went through this”) and at the same time kept hungry and dissatisfied (“I want to experience more”).
But what about people who are just not feeling any hunger for experience? Luboslava said that all she wants is that her 3 kids are happy. If I take this information at face value, she positions the source of her happiness outside of her own control radius, leaving everything up to her subjective perception of their own happiness.
When she said that I agree, I was not able to persuade myself at that moment to fully envision myself in that position. I want to fully listen to the music of life, be influenced, inspired, sometimes bored, sometimes hurt, sometimes enriched by it.
And maybe truly in the end, it doesn’t really matter at all. Just as anybody decides what kind of music he or she likes, everybody also defines the quality of their lived life by their own standards.
No matter how sad this statement is, I yet hope to find out a better argument.