Music Therapist On Break

It is time for the Break Chronicles Winter 2024 to start up. I am sitting in my childhood home after a struggle with the router that denied all access to the internet for two of three devices that I brought home with me, and, having finally figured out how to gain said access, am sitting on the loveseat watching my mother putter around with her newest creative kick - Barbie furniture! It is always fun to see what is next with her, and it explains so much about why my sister and I are the way we are in how we do things.

I think, in this particular case, I am more like my mother than my sister is. When it comes to hobbies and ideas and creativity, I tend to be like Mom - piles everywhere, many different ideas that just keep adding to themselves, and not much of a plan for the finished project except to just do things. My sister always has her intended audience in mind when she starts things. Mom tends to go in with the need to make without consideration of what she will do with things once they are made. For her, and for me as well, the process is more important than the product.

Do future music therapists still learn about process over product in their music therapy courses? We did, and it still resonates with me in my current music therapy practice. I want to focus more on how my clients are reacting, are creating, are experiencing music than on what the end result sounds like. The performance is not the desired result of our time together - we are not focusing on getting the right notes. we are just doing something that we love.

I get a kick out of watching my mother as she putters. She is currently making bar stools to go with a bar table that she made earlier this week. She makes these things out of junk and then fancies them all up. The bar stool seats are started with a hexagon paper punch - you know, the ones that punch out shapes. Then, she layers a bit of stuffing on top, covers the entire thing in fabric, and then glues it to the stools that she has made out of small, wooden dowels. A coat of paint, and voila! A bar stool that Barbie can sit on while she is waiting for her friends to arrive at her vacation home! (My sister, by the way, did the exact same type of project for her classroom, but they were milk crate storage seating rather than bar stools! Things transfer all the time!!) 

Mom has a little, self-satisfied chuckle that she emits every time she finishes something the way she envisions it in her head. It is fun to hear. We will be working on making some rooms for the furniture that she has been making. That is part of my assignment for this week - helping Mom make the rooms.

I think Mom's way with creativity is one of the reasons why I prefer making things to purchasing them. I get great joy out of making task boxes. I don't feel as much of an urge to use them, but I do get lots of ideas on how to use them that I wish I could share with others. In my experience, other people do not have this type of creative possibility, and that makes me wonder why.

Are we, as a society, no longer interested in process over product? My initial thoughts are that we no longer care that someone makes things as long as we can get what we want when we want it which is usually NOW! We don't care as much about the skill involved in making a scarf as much as just wanting to have the scarf. It also seems that people are more willing to pay someone else to make the scarf than to learn how to make many scarves themselves. It is curious to me why this has happened to us as people in general.

Now, don't get me wrong - I am just as guilty of this as anyone, but I also have some pretty solid creative and survival skill sets in my life experiences, too. I can cook you a good meal on a camp stove. I can purify water, if needed, using the sun. I can take a hank of yarn and turn it into a pretty scarf. I can take a piece of junk and turn it into a candlestick. There are many things that I can do that other people I know are not interested in learning, and vice versa. I don't have any desire to learn how to change the oil in my car. I will gladly pay others to do that for me. I hope it all evens out before we really need to rely on those skills to survive.

*Okay, catastrophizing brain, time to take a break. We are on holiday, by the way!!*

For me, the process of making something is more valuable than the product of that process. It always has been, and I hope it always will be.

Happy day, all!