Journal · On the Path
The Dream That Was Never Mine
On knowing who you are — and, just as much, who you are not.
Sometimes, in the middle of a lesson, I catch myself doing the very thing I most want to avoid. I am pushing a student toward something — a sound, a direction, a future — that I have imagined for them. It is well-meant; I can see what they might become. But somewhere in me a quieter voice asks: is this their path, or the one I am projecting onto them? When I hear it, I stop. I hand the question back to where it belongs, and I ask them to sit with their own intuition, their own pull, and tell me what they actually want. A teacher can open doors. He must never decide which room a person is meant to live in.
Knowing who you are is only half the work. The harder, freer knowledge is learning who you are not.
I am careful about this because I had to learn it the long way, over many years, on my own path. I came to percussion late — but do not picture someone anxious or lost. Those early years were full of passion. I practiced from sunrise to sunset, not to claw back lost time but because I loved it without reservation, and I was closely in touch with my own intuition. The late start gave me urgency. The love gave me everything else.
From there my path unfolded the way a musician’s does. I began performing with others, and in time with well-known artists. Those were natural steps — musically, professionally, and yes, financially — and they were right for the years I was in. I do not look back on them as a mistake. I was present, and I was growing.
What changed came slowly, and it was specific. More and more, I was being hired — and being hired often meant playing music that was not my heart, with people I did not feel connected to. The first times, that is simply the work, and it is fine. But as the years passed, that kind of playing grew harder and harder for me. On stage, I would grow harshly self-critical — standing outside my own playing and judging it even as it happened. I would finish a performance that should have satisfied me and feel a quiet distance — from my roots, from my own presence. Not every night, and not from the beginning. But the feeling deepened, and I could not talk myself out of it. Why, I kept asking, am I not flourishing here, in the place I worked so long to reach? Why can I not get to the depth and the strength I know are inside me?
The answer had been beside me the whole time, in the places I overlooked precisely because they came so naturally. Teaching always connected me — deeply, and from very early. I knew almost from the start that it would be a large part of my life: to hand others the gift my own teachers gave me, to help people walk toward their own dreams. And making music with people I genuinely loved, people I felt bound to, gave me the exact presence I kept missing in the hired rooms. The signs were not subtle. I simply did not want to read them, because they pointed somewhere quieter than the dream I was holding.
It took me years to give up a dream that, in the end, was never mine. Being a freelance percussionist — a life of being called and booked and hired to play — that was the dream, and by an honest accounting I never reached the heights I had imagined for it. I worked at it for years. I performed around the world. But it never became what I had hoped, and the reason is simple, though it took me a long time to say out loud: that life is not who I am. It was not what I lay awake at night dreaming about. I fought the truth. I resented it. I called it a failure for a while before I could see it clearly.
I do not regret the years, or the stages. I only had to learn that the destination I was chasing was never mine.
And then I let go. Not in defeat — I want to be clear about that. I stopped forcing a shape onto a life that kept quietly refusing it. And the moment I did, the ground shifted. Deeper layers of teaching opened to me. The creativity I had been straining for arrived on its own. The strength I could not reach was never in the hired rooms; it was waiting in the directions I had been too busy, or too unsure, to walk into fully.
So here is what I would tell you, as gently as I can. Know who you are. But spend just as much care learning who you are not. A path can be real, and right for a season, and still not be the one you are meant to keep walking. The work that is genuinely yours is often the one that feels too much like home to take seriously. Take it seriously. That sense of home is not a lack of ambition. It is the map.
Who you are not is not a loss to mourn. It is the room your real life needs in order to arrive.
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