Remember your why

One of the many podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis is called Running Commentary. In it, two stand up comedians, Paul Tonkinson and Rob Deering, go for a run and have a chat. I very rarely run with other people, so the concept of talking, intelligibly, throughout a run, is entirely alien to me, but I’m very glad that they have the skills to do this, as their voices have accompanied me on many lengthy running outings over the years.

Paul and Rob are both pretty good runners - they regularly take on marathons and, in recent years, have dipped their toes into the currents of the ultra-running scene. Something that they have talked about, increasingly, when taking on these kinds of races, is finding their ‘why’. Podcast aside, running is, for them, a hobby - they’re not professional athletes and there is no obligation on them to do any particular race. Training for any kind of physical challenge is difficult, and when you’re tackling marathons or ultras, you’re also making a significant time investment in terms of how much you need to run in the build up to the event to make sure you’re fit enough to complete it without injury. At some point during that training, perhaps at 6am on a Sunday when you’ve had a late night the day before and you’re staring down the barrel of a 20 mile training run, you will ask yourself why on earth you are doing this ridiculous thing that nobody is forcing you to do. What you need is a convincing answer to this question.

In running terms, your why can take many shapes. I remember signing up for my first 10k race when I was in my early twenties and applying almost entirely unsuccessfully for entry level arts jobs. I was working so hard on applications and interviews and facing so much rejection - I felt I needed something where I could succeed on my own terms, that was totally within my control. I’ve had goals about running faster, running longer distances than I thought was possible for me, getting my speed / distance back after having my kids. Having a deeper rationale for why it matters keeps you anchored when things are tough - if training’s not going to plan, say, or you’re filled with nerves the night before a race, wondering if it’s all worth it - the why reminds you that it is.

Our jobs, for most of us, are not voluntary. We must do them to earn money (which, for me, bankrolls the running shoes and the race entry fees, amongst other, more necessary things). But it’s also true that there are many kinds of careers that we could have - and, for those of us who have jobs in the arts, there are often a number of other sectors where we could use a similar skillset but be much better paid. Career changes are scary but more possible than many people think - my partner went from a career in the arts to driving trains for a living, and last weekend I met a woman who had worked as a travel agent for thirty years and now cleans ponds three days a week. So it’s all possible - and it’s important to remember this because staying in a sector or in a particular career might not feel like a choice, but it is. It’s not a default option, but an active decision that we make every day, month and year to stay on this path rather than seek an alternative.

I make this point to emphasise the importance of knowing why you do the job you do and why you work in the sector that you do. It’s not enough, I think, for the answer to be ‘I always have, and therefore I always will’. For myself, when times are hard and I have to do difficult things or am confronted by impossible choices, I really need to feel a connection to why this is the thing I’ve decided to do with my life - why this, rather than a better paid or more straightforward job somewhere else.

I had one of these moments a few weeks ago. The choir that I sing with has an outreach programme and I had signed up to sing in the culminating performance, an afternoon concert with 30 or 40 choir members supporting around 100 Year 4 and 5 children, to an audience of their parents and their teachers. I’d loved singing in previous iterations of these concerts and, as the icing on the cake, this year all the songs were musical theatre numbers, so I knew I would be in my happy place.

And it was incredible. The parents were whooping and cheering their kids at every opportunity - phones were out so they could capture their children on video and no one was tutting or telling them to put them away. From where I was standing I could see the class teachers sitting in front of each group of kids, mouthing the words, silently cheering them on. And the children were terrific, loud and clear and shimmying away as they sang, in the way that children do before they hit puberty and the crushing self-consciousness and fear of what other people might think of them begins to loom ever larger in their minds.

There were two moments that particularly got me. One was when we were singing the final song altogether, We Know the Way from Moana. This is an amazing song and the kids were clearly wildly excited to sing it. There’s a line in it where the choir quietly sings a chord and the children sing “We tell the stories of our elders in a never ending chain” and it sent shivers down my spine, because, for me, that’s what art is all about. It’s how we construct the narratives of what’s come before - how we make sense of a world that is ultimately too big and complicated for us to ever really understand.

And the second was a song which the children sang entirely on their own - Pure Imagination from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There’ve been various iterations of this film, but it brought back memories of watching the Gene Wilder version when I was a child, in all its chaotic weirdness. It’s such a terrific song, placed within an equally terrific story, and it tells us about the power of creating something that brings joy - as the song says, “There is no life I know that compares to pure imagination”. Whilst we cannot, like Willy Wonka, live locked within our chocolate factory all the time, in that moment, watching these kids find joy within these words and these melodies, it reminded me how lucky I was to spend my days working in a sector that operates in this world of pure imagination, that can bring us joy, can move us to tears, can help us empathise with people who aren’t us, can inspire us to change the world just a little bit. And maybe, within those hundred or so children, there are a handful of them who felt that too, who might want to spend some of their life as audience members, as amateur musicians (like me) or professional creators. Maybe this was a moment where that felt possible.

The poet William Wordsworth wrote about a concept called ‘spots of time’ - small, memorable moments that stick in our minds and allow us to reconnect to awe and joy when confronted with the difficulties or even just mundanities of life. Wordsworth mostly applied this concept to experiences in the natural world, but I think it relates equally well to moments that we have within our work that sears an image on our brain, that lives within us as a strikingly clear and coherent memory that we can turn to when we wonder why on earth we do the thing we do. I have built up a small catalogue of these over the years linked to shows I’ve watched, projects I’ve worked on, interactions I’ve had with people, experiences like the choir concert a few weeks ago - and I try, when things are tough, to take myself back to the emotional resonance of those moments, of what they made me feel, of what they told me about why I have chosen to spend my time this way. Because our whys, I think, are mostly from the heart, not the head - they are a feeling, rather than a thought, and, if we can connect with them, they can fuel us through the moments of difficulty by reminding us of the moments of joy.