Life Lessons from a Joan Osborne Concert

Life Lessons from the Joan Osborne Concert:

An Open Letter to Two Young People

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Last week I flew to Dallas to see a Joan Osborne concert.  I was met at the airport by a good friend who is the rector of an Anglican church.  The rector, his wife, their oldest son and their oldest daughter all joined me in going to the concert.  The fourteen year old son and his eleven year old sister were the only two children that I saw in the Kessler Theater that evening.  I asked them after the concert if they would like to write about their concert experiences on my blog site.  They kind of looked at me as if I were crazy; and that was just maybe an appropriate and analytically correct response.  If they had taken me up on the offer it might well have been interesting to read about the experiences and feelings of two young people talking about their going to a Joan Osborne concert.  Instead I am going to write an open letter to this young brother and sister about what I think are some life lessons they could learn as they remember their experiences of going to the concert.  These are the kind of lessons that can be important to realize for an eleven year old or for a fifty something year-old.  I will only mention two things that if you appreciate from this concert will help you to make a success out of whatever you do in life.

            1.  Cooperation

            I wonder what sort of picture each of you had in your mind when your parents told you that we were going to go to a “Joan Osborne concert.”  You might think that there would only be one person on the stage.  But there was a musician playing the keyboard, and another one playing the guitar, as well as Joan Osborne singing.  It was Joan’s voice that we heard but the concert involved the talents of three people cooperating to produce the sound of the music we heard.  There were also stage hands that helped get everything set up, and there were people who had gotten the Kessler Theater ready for people to come and hear the concert.  A lot of people were involved in making the concert possible and in enabling it to be the experience it was.  So if you think about the concert, it required a lot of people working together in cooperation to make the evening special for all the people that came to enjoy the concert.

Can you imagine if one person had tried to put on the entire concert?  What if Joan Osborne had tried to do everything?  She did play an instrument at one point, but mostly she relied on the two other performers to play their instruments, which they played very well.  Imagine if she had to fix the refreshments that we in the audience ate and drank.  Imagine if she had to set up all the tables and folding chairs in the theater, before the concert began and then check off the names of the people coming in that had purchased seats and were listed on a sheet of paper.  If you remember there was a man at the door who marked off my name and five spots on the sheet when we came in to the theater.  The concert involved lots of people cooperating to make the evening into the concert it was.  One of the things I have always liked about Joan Osborne is how she shows her appreciation to other members in the band, and everybody who worked hard to make the show a success.  She knows that even if the concert is described by her name that a lot of people worked together to make the evening a success.  So that is the first lesson about life, and maybe the most important one that I hope you think about.  Whatever sort of job you have in life there will only be so much you can do without others.  You will be able to accomplish so much more in life if you learn how to cooperate with others to be able to do something fun and worthwhile in life.  So whether you are playing with others or doing a job with others, learning how to cooperate with others will be an important skill to be used at work or play, on the job and in the family forever.

2.  Practice

Both of you take music lessons, and you probably have already figured out that you play your instruments better if you spend time practicing than if you don’t.  Every person that sang or played an instrument at the concert spent lots of time practicing.  Your Dad spends time preparing for a homily, your art teacher at school has spent lots of time in the shop, painting, sculpting, and carving.  There is an old saying that says “If something is important enough to be done, it is important enough to be done well.”  But in most things in life we have to do things not so well until we can do them well.  Joan Osborne and the other musical performers you saw were once little children who had to learn the “Do-Re-Mi” scale of music.  Each of them had the first time of trying to play a musical instrument.  They had to learn how to make notes, chords, and keep time; and they had to practice if they wanted to get to a point where they played the instruments really well.  Whatever gift and talent you have been given, and whatever thing you love to do, to turn that talent and joy into something really special will take practice, study, and doing over and over again until you have mastered what you are doing.

I hope in a few years, each of you will find something you want to do with your life, and when you do if you remember that in everything cooperation with others and practicing until you can do something really well will help you give a gift to others, just as I felt like I had received a gift from Joan Osborne and all the people who made the concert special for me last week.  Someday whether as a musician or in a career or whatever you do in life, learning to cooperate with others and spending time practicing will enable you to give a blessing and a gift to others.  If some of the things I have written don’t make sense, I am sure your parents will be better at explaining these things.