Making Time

On Friday night, Vasudeva – hailing from New Jersey and one of my all-time favorite instrumental bands – played just a mile or two from where I live. It was great to get out to see them again, especially since the last time I saw them was about a year ago in New Jersey, when I was still writing regularly for Type In Stereo (I wrote about that excellent weekend here).

And yet as great as their actual performance was – and it was truly awesome, so if you ever have the chance to see Vasudeva perform, I cannot recommend them highly enough – it was hard not to feel like the best part of the night was seeing a lot of people that I love and yet somehow manage to not see often enough.

There’s no doubt that distance makes socializing more difficult and as I get older I’m realizing that it takes less and less distance to cause a problem. Part of the issue too, I imagine, is habit. I lived on the Oregon coast for two years during which I was able to see my close friends and family on probably two or three days per year. Though I live much, much closer now, and though two years in relative isolation is not exactly a life sentence to solitary confinement, it was apparently long enough for some habits – including not being very proactive about socialization – to become fairly deeply ingrained.

So Friday’s concert reminded me of two things. 1) Music, as I’ve said before, has an amazing power to bring people together. And 2) I need to be better about spending time with the people I care about. Between working all day and then expending plenty of effort on trying to better myself as a writer (not to mention the minutia of everyday life like cooking, cleaning, and taking care of our dogs), it’s easy to feel like there’s no time for anything else. Well, I want to be better about making time. Call it a half-year’s resolution.