Nobody Asked Us To Do Any Of It

There was a practice room in college with a radiator that banged on the quarter hour, and four of us in it, ten hours a week, for no credit.

Nobody assigned it. There was no jury at the end. We decided we were a quartet, and then behaved like one until it was true.

We built a website in 2001, which at the time meant somebody’s roommate and a book. We made an album. We got ourselves a showcase at our national convention pairing live chamber music with interactive video, which nobody was doing then and which we mostly figured out by being wrong in public a few times.

I’ve thought about that room more this fall than I expected to.

Because the pattern held. Every single thing in my working life that turned into something — the festival, the ensembles, the writing — started the same way. Not with an invitation. With a few people deciding to act as if the thing already existed.

Assigned work has a deadline and a grader and a clear finish. It is also, almost by definition, work somebody else already imagined. You can do it excellently and still land exactly where the assignment pointed.

Unassigned work is slower, and it feels indulgent for a long time. There’s no external signal telling you it’s going well. Ten hours a week is a lot to spend on something that might amount to nothing, and for most of that year it did amount to nothing.

Then it compounded, all at once, in a way I could not have planned.

I’m not romanticizing being busy. Those hours came out of something — sleep, mostly, and a social life I remember very little of. The point isn’t volume. It’s that the hours went somewhere nobody was watching, which is the only place work becomes yours instead of a well-executed version of somebody else’s idea.

So the question I keep putting to my students, and lately to myself: what are you working on that nobody asked for?

If the answer is nothing, that’s worth knowing. It usually means the assigned work has quietly taken all of it.

I write a note most Saturdays about what I’m making and what I’m practicing. It’s here if you want it.