Enjoy some quiet time to recharge your energies

Quiet time… is it a real thing? As singers, we are often living in a musical. We sing in the shower, the bedroom, the car. I sing while cooking, and after eating. But sometimes, my voice and my head want something different. They want to talk, or just hang out and talk about something different. Does it happen to you?

I feel weird writing about this when my blog is all about choral music. However, you might already know that I am also into trying to balance things off in my life. If all that I talk about is concerts and singing, then I am single-minded and it might get boring at some point.

I don’t want that to happen, ever!

Chosen Quiet Time

Back in 2016, I decided to take a break from writing music. It was a weird situation that made me feel uncomfortable for a while. When I got used to the quiet time, I could feel the benefit of the distance with my pieces.

I started to miss composing and went back to it with even more energy than before. So much that I wrote Seven Seconds of Love, the piece that led me to win my first composition competition and meet my husband, Ryan Heller.

Know that you will be ok on the other side

For me, It was uncomfortable because I thought it would hurt me to not keep writing. It was the opposite as you read! Trusting that my music would always be there is what helped me to go through that period of recharging my energies.

The same can happen to your voice, to your body. You can’t sing for the whole day or the whole week.

Your body will beg you to stop, and your mind will probably want to find something different to do. You might want to do it all to get more money, or more experience, or just because you have a hard time saying no. No matter what the reason is, it is important to know that quiet time is ok, and it is needed. It brings balance to your life.

Forced (Chosen) Quiet Time

This year (2019), I chose to stop writing music for a while because it was too painful for a while. After an unpleasant, and quite unfortunate, last experience in my composition juries, I was too hurt and left with too many questions to keep trying to write music. I managed to push through and write very important pieces for me, but after that, I needed to breathe.

I needed the space from my pieces.

Maybe that was the real reason to stop. Maybe writing ¡Ayúdame! was too hard, and I needed to heal. But the truth is that the time away allowed me to keep asking myself questions about what I wanted and how I wanted to share myself and my art.

Quiet time during the holidays

Sometimes, during the holidays, it feels that way to me. I want to work and the constant schedule of concerts, gatherings, etc gets in the middle. What I do is try to reframe it as my quiet time to let myself have some distance from my pieces, so I can love on them much more when I come back.

I call my pieces my children, and I know a lot about them, but they keep teaching me a lot that I don’t.

How do you feel about quiet time? Comment or email me!