More to life

The friend here said to me seriously one night: "There is more to life than samba." She'd just completed a weekend of all-night costume construction, samba dance performance, partying and a grueling three-hour parade the next day; yet she was describing herself as "less addicted" to samba than others. She felt she had to defend her choice to not learn tamborim, and instead to stay with her other loves of piano and other dance forms.

A second friend said to me last night, when I was describing how nice it was to be in New York (where I'd been just biking around and spending time with friends, not doing Brazilian music) "So if you went to New York you could get your life back."

I knew immediately what they both meant. People often think of me as being addicted to samba: "I can't believe you'd travel to another city just to play samba! You're obsessed!" But the odd thing is, I'm actually not all that obsessed. I don't even listen to Brazilian music that much. (in fact, I'm kind of embarrassed by how little I listen to it.)

The thing that everybody misses is that there are NO anchors holding me in one place. If you have no job, home, possessions, family or friends, there is no reason NOT to move to the next city down the coast, or the next continent, just to join its samba band. If I didn't do that, I'd drift to San Diego to learn to surf, or head to Louisiana to join the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker. Whatever. If you are that light on the earth, a puff of wind can blow you three thousand miles. Samba is as good a reason to travel as any other.

(ok, "no family or friends" is not really true - I do have family & friends. It's just that they're scattered so evenly all over the planet that there's no one city that has more of them than any other city.)

But the surprising thing, the extra cool thing about samba, the thing that I never expected, is that I doubt there's any other way I could have met more people, or made better friends, or have more travel opportunities, or have as much impetus to improve my musicianship and my dance and my language skills. Where else can you go to any other city in the world and immediately be playing music with 80 of your new best friends? It's not samba itself, really, that has been so addictive. It's the things that it leads to, the people I have met, the doors that it has opened for me. In the end, I might keep on playing samba, but I probably won't; but at the end of it I'll be a better musician, I'll have learned stick and hand drum skills that I can put to use in a hundred other kinds of music. And I'll have travelled all over the world, I'll have learned at least one language if not more, and I'll have friends in dozens of major cities. Those are the lasting things.

As for the "you'll have your life back in New York" - No, I'll have a life for the first time. I never had one before.