Easier and its Discontents

When I first got my license, the main places I drove myself were to my cello lesson and to youth orchestra rehearsal. They weren't the easiest drives--Market Street and along the C line in Brookline, and Storrow Drive to the BU campus, for the Boston-geography-enabled--but they were a lot easier than the things I was driving to. On the way I often thought about how competent I was at driving after only a few months of doing it, compared to how much I struggled with an instrument I'd been playing since I was eight. Driving is just a LOT easier than playing the cello. Infinitely easier, staggeringly easier. So much easier that I had to wonder why I kept doing the thing that I would never "succeed" at, never be able to relax into, to roll down the window and turn up the radio and think my thoughts and navigate a tricky passage without it meaning anything at all.

This is coming back to me now because blogging is a hell of a lot easier than writing poems.