Thomas J. West Music

This quote was collected from a friend on Facebook:

Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- attributed to Howard Thurman

About a year ago, a well-intentioned friend of mine told me about an opening in his company and told me that I was wasting my intelligence and abilities in a career such as teaching and how much more money I could be making. I thanked him for the compliment on my abilities and accepted that suggestion gracefully. Quite frankly, I'm exactly where I am supposed to be - finally.

Four years ago, I was out of a job. Collecting unemployment, teaching lessons, substitute teaching, judging march band shows, and still not making ends meet was my experience that year. I considered leaving the music education profession. I did an interview for a job as a piano tuning technician with on-the-job training. It was at that point that I finally found myself teaching for a school that would allow me the creative flexibility to experiment and find the best methods of teaching young people about music - the school I teach for now.

My website has become the vehicle by which I am able to share my love of music with a much larger audience. One of my frustrations with being a high school band director was always having a limited amount of students I could directly affect. I never could have predicted that my work online was going to be the work that allowed me to reach out to so many with everything I know about music.

In many ways, my life has felt like it has finally "come alive". Life isn't perfect by any means - I have my own trials and personal challenges. But, at age 38, I finally feel like I am coming into my own and marching to my own drum. My wish is that every human being could find their passion and pursue it as I have. My passion is music in all its forms: teaching, performing, singing, playing, studying, enjoying, composing, creating. When it comes to music, there's not a whole lot that I don't want to do (or haven't already done).

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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