Playing Your Keyboard in the Subway

For the past six years, the article Going Under Happily, about a former finance executive who plays his keyboard in the New York City subway, has hung on my refrigerator.

I have moved twice since the article was first published, and it has made it intact through both inter- and intra-state moves.

I reached for the scissors to cut out the article after I read these lines by the article’s author, Pete Muller:

“Winning the game in finance, not making money, was interesting to me. Money was a measure of success, but that’s all it was. In music, you don’t win in the same way. Yeah, you could sell a lot of albums, but that has a whole lot more to do with marketing than with content. Recognition and respect from your peers, critical acclaim, that stuff is important, but it’s all very subjective. The most important thing is to respect your own evaluation of what you’re creating. In finance, the world is telling you how you’re doing. And in music, you don’t want to listen too much to what everyone else thinks. “

A benefit of our 21st century lifespan is that we get to go back to where we started – curious, creative, and ego-free – because we live long enough to do it. There are only so many years we can go around defining ourselves by our jobs and roles without feeling somewhat limited. “I’m a finance executive” may sound okay to you at 40, but, at 60, you might ask: is that it?

For me, it got to the point where going to a job where office politics was valued above the work began to feel unseemly.  I don’t know how that word translates into other languages, but in English it’s: “Not in accord with accepted standards of good taste.” What a great word!

It feels in poor taste to be old and wise enough to know that you’re simply playing a game, and to keep playing it anyway.

Pete Muller says:

“Once you’re successful at a career and you’ve figured the game out, it just gets easy. To really put your ego on the line in a new way is much harder.”

In Buddhism, when you stop fearing life, you stop fearing death. It seems only natural that, as we get older, we would take more, not fewer, risks. Remember the days when your goal wasn’t to impress others with your vast knowledge of something, but simply to show them the picture you drew, the fort you made, or how you could do a handstand? You had no ego. You just wanted to do things and make stuff!

What once came naturally to us is now the risk. And if we want contentment as we age, we need to take the risk. It means our lives come full circle, which is in accordance with the rest of the natural world (and also in accordance with good taste…).

“When you’re playing in the subway, 98 percent of the people who walk by — you could be Elton John, and they’re not going to care. It’s definitely ego-deflating, but it’s kind of great. You have to be very centered in yourself and really be playing for yourself but still sending out enough emotion that you can touch people as they walk past.”