Apprehension

I think I would best describe my mood this morning as apprehensive.  You see, in about an hour, my wife and I will find out the gender of our baby, who is due in late March.  This is a source of interest for us both, a source of excitement ... and quite definitely a source of apprehension.  What type of clothes will we need to buy?  Will we be buying ballet slippers or football pads?  Will we be buying Barbies or comic books?  Will we be buying in to extremely cliche and out-of-date stereotypes?

The thing is, finding out the gender of our child -- like a great lot of things in our lives, and especially our creative lives -- should not be a source of worry.  Why?  It's already been decided.  All the worry in the world won't change a thing about it right now -- not my worry, not my wife's, not our families' ... nobody's.  What we are apprehensive about is the discovery, about actually having that knowledge, no matter the result.

Even though I've now got something like eighty pieces of music accepted by publishers, I still get the same feeling every time I open a letter or email that looks like it might be from a publisher.  Did the piece get accepted?  Did it get rejected?  Will the note be full of snide comments about my inability to adequately modulate between two keys? 

The thing is, though, by the time the letter or email shows up, there's not a thing I can do about the outcome!  If I had wanted an increased chance of a piece getting accepted, the time for worry and concern -- and action -- was back when I was writing it, not when the editor is giving me a decision.  Despite this fact, though, I still get that little twinge in my gut when I click on the email link, wondering what it will say, even though the time for my ability to influence it is long past.

Now, granted, without a lot of genetic manipulation and strange Mystic Rites, there wasn't a whole lot my wife and I could have done to pick the gender of our child.  However, being apprehensive at this point about what the gender will be is a waste of energy and a drain on our lives ... yet we do it anyway.  This, I'm sad to say, is just plain ol' human nature.

So, what can you take from this?  If there's anything in your life you feel apprehensive about, ask yourself, "Can I do anything to change it now?"  If the answer is yes, then do it.  If the answer is no, then ask yourself when the time for attempting to change things was ... and then next time, make those changes at the appropriate time.

In the meantime, I'm going back to being apprehensive about something I can't change.  Sometimes, human nature just wins out.