A devastating flash-flood recently swept away the pleasant landscape of my imagined future: an incurable cancer diagnosis. Bastard. How to process that news? My mind has lurched for two months. Obviously, this is all some terrible mistake. I have a healthy lifestyle. You’ve got the wrong guy. Come on, there’s more living to do, more music to write. But such pleadings – to whom or what I don’t know – rebound from a stone wall. The reality is immutable.
In his book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman highlights the obsession we have with the future: always trying to lasso it from the present, writing to-do lists around it, deluding ourselves that we have it all under control. That’s been me, right there ... years spent dreaming of the pieces I’d yet to write and record; tweaking my studio setup to optimise future workflow; stacking a tower of useless to-do-list cruft.
