Dress Rehearsal

"Maybe twice in my life I reached what I wanted to. Once we were playing
"These Foolish Things" and at the end the band stops and I play a little
cadenza. That cadenza - no one does it better. Let's say it's five bars.
That's a very good thing to have done in a lifetime. An artist should be
judged by his best, just as an athlete. Pick out my one or two best things

and say, "That's what we did; all the rest was rehearsal." ~Artie Shaw,
famous clarinetist.

At some time or another, we've all experienced the exhilarating joy of being
everything we've ever dreamed of. Our performance was impeccable. We hit all
the right notes, got all the answers right, won the race, were the star of
the show, hit the ball clear out of the park. The applause was amazing, the
attention and admiration more thrilling than anything we've ever known. We
can't get enough of it. We want it to last forever. We've tasted the glory
we know we've been created to exist in and it's as if all the pieces of our
life are finally falling right into place. Something in us cries out, "Yes!
This is what I was meant for!" And we experience the glorious moment when
all we've longed to be is here and ours and coming true. "What I do is me;
for that I came." ~Hopkins.

But then real life comes back in with its responsibilities and expectations and that shimmering experience and all it promised us fades away. We begin to lose heart. We feel disillusioned and disoriented. Was that it? Is that all there is? We don't get to be more? The fairytale is over and the pumpkin has come to take us back home to reality. But what is our true reality? Is this life really all there is? Do we really only get one chance to make our dreams come true? Is the stage we just stepped off of the last one we'll ever be on? Or is there something else going on, something divine and deliberate and deserving of praise? Could it be that those brilliant experiences are revealing something to us about where we're heading?

There is a false belief that this life is all there is for us. That we only
have one chance to make something of ourselves and if we miss it we'll never
get it back. It's now or never. Get it while it's hot or you'll never get
another bite ever again. We're driven by a manic urgency to accomplish
everything we know we're supposed to right this second. We believe we have
to. We feel like we're failing if we don't. Otherwise, our life is just a

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