I’ve been having déjà vu over the past year or so, since I’ve started brushing up on my music skills.
I’ve done something like this before. Almost 20 years ago, when I was trying to take my software skills up to a professional level. I was spending my spare time reading books and articles to learn the technical details of the field, practicing and going to public events to learn more, volunteering to do any computer-related thing at work.
Of course, some of the details are different. I remember reading paper magazines on bus trips to Boston back then, and am more likely listening to podcasts in my car now. Ok, I’m not exactly volunteering to sing at work, but I’ve similarly been finding opportunities to lead and teach sacred music at home and at my home synagogue.
People who’ve met me since I’ve moved to Boston probably assume that software was the career I went to college for, but actually it was a career change I made early on. The other familiar side of this is not knowing yet if I’ll ever feel like a “real” part of the new field I’m learning about, if I’ll be accepted and make it a career change or just a story to add to my experiences.
Around the time of that earlier career transition, I used a screen name “InfoArtist” on various services, because my passion was bridging creative work and information technology. I’m not planning to resurrect that name, but “geeking out” on a new mix of artistic and technical subjects is still fun.
Not everything is the same now: at this point in my life I am in some ways more confident and yet sometimes more measured in in what I do. I know that who I truly am is more than any one job or even profession, and there’s enough left to learn to last a lifetime.