What's going on here?

I seem to be developing a theme here -- basically, "Man (and woman) does not live by music alone." Am I still trying to justify quitting, or my lack of success at it, by pointing out these cautionary tales of truncated, empty lives?

Or am I trying to get at why I could never throw myself into it completely? Perhaps it was a self-preservative instinct that kept me from doing so. If you don't commit, it's harder to get hurt.

Perhaps the people who crash and burn give it their all, and then they don't have anything left when things get rough.

Then there's the question of what "success" even means in this business. To me, it's always been figuring out how to set up one's life with a good balance among all of one's activities, both those necessary to survive and those that serve to feed one's interests and passions.


I know now that I've set things up so that I can work on the piano any time I want to, playing the cello doesn't make me feel sad the way it used to. All of my eggs are not in one basket.

This is something I need to think about some more.