It doesn't matter why

It can fly away wherever it wants to. (Image by Zhu Bing)

Years ago, I was teaching music lessons six days a week and managing my music school on top of that.

I like to be busy, but I was starting to get tired. To my surprise, the thing I was getting tired of was not the bookkeeping and appointment setting and other mundane tasks. It was teaching the music lessons.

I found myself with less patience and more resignation. The energy I usually put into problem-solving, digging deep and going beyond the minimum to find just the right approach for a given student — it just wasn’t there. When a student would push back or whine about something I asked her to do, I felt exhausted instead of amused.

This led to a crisis for me. My identity was wrapped up in being an exceptional music teacher. Who was I becoming? How could I justify running a music school if I didn’t even like teaching music lessons?

Most of all, I wondered why. If i could just figure out why I felt this way, then maybe I could fix it.

What I’ve learned since is that it doesn’t matter why. Why does a napping cat suddenly wake up, stretch, and turn around and go back to sleep facing the other way? Who knows. People get to change jobs all the time. It doesn’t have to be counted as a failure.

In retrospect, it made sense that I felt this way. I had been teaching music lessons full time for several years, and I had now added a second job as an administrator on top of that. It was perfectly reasonable to seek a change. I could have skipped all of the guilt and shame.

I didn’t know it then, but my discontent was actually the start of my journey from owning my own job to owning my own business. From there, I eventually shifted from business owner to entrepreneur.

If I had never experienced signs of burnout, I would still be teaching music lessons. Nothing wrong with that, but I had other things I wanted to do. Clearly, because I’ve done them in the years since.

I didn’t have the perspective to see any of this at the time. I just felt like I couldn’t do my life and needed to do something differently. After months of resisting this truth by just trying harder, I let go and accepted reality. It didn’t matter why I wanted to quit teaching. I just did. So I made a plan to change things and followed through on it. A few years later, I was running The Little Middle School, something I never could have done if I hadn’t stepped away from teaching music lessons full time — and something I could never have known was on the horizon.

Recently, I felt the same sense of burnout regarding The Little Middle School. I had the same series of thoughts: “Why is this happening? I love this work! What is wrong with me?”

But when I let go of trying to figure out why, I was left with a sense of peace. After more than eight years, I’m allowed to do a different job if I want to. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with me at all.

So now the brilliant Erin Palovick is at the helm, infusing new ideas and energy into the program. And I get to have a little space to think about what’s next. I don’t have to justify or explain it — it is simply the new reality. It’s what I want, just like the cat who apparently wants to sleep with her head pointed east instead of west. “Why” is irrelevant.

I am interested to see what will happen next. I’m continuing to pay attention to the inner promptings that guide me along the path. I don’t always know where these impulses are leading me, but I’ve come to trust them.

If you have an unexpected desire or aversion that arises from within, I wonder if you might give yourself the same generosity. Might you experience what you want without judging it? Might you give yourself permission to act on a clear preference even if you don’t understand why you want what you want? Where could it take you?

Sometimes, understanding why we do what we do gives us valuable information. But sometimes, it doesn’t matter. We can allow ourselves to live the way we want, regardless of why we want it. Later, we may see what it was all for and why. But it’s okay if that’s not where we begin.