I still remember what I was doing back in 2001 in the days leading up to the September 11 attacks. In those years Wendy and I lived in a condo on the New Westminster waterfront just outside of Vancouver and we were making the initial preparations for making the move to Toronto a year later. Having just accepted a last-minute offer to play a concert tour of northern BC with violinist Judy Kang, I was looking forward to some time to focus on learning her concert program in only two days. Judy was to arrive from New York on Wednesday, September 12 for rehearsals on the 13th prior to our flight up to Prince Rupert for the first concert that weekend. My first day of practicing was scheduled to be September 11.

On that fateful morning, I got up at 6am for an hour of yoga prior to checking my email or the internet. I had finished a full and energizing routine when my mother-in-law called just after 7am Pacific (10am Eastern) to ask if I knew what was going on, and to turn on the TV immediately. One of my most vivid memories of that morning is stepping outside to the balcony a short while later and noticing that the sky was filled with around two dozen planes en route to emergency landings at Vancouver International Airport.

That was how my September 11 started, with the intention of practicing the entire day. But with my plans completely derailed trying to make sense of what had happened that day, I didn’t actually start practicing until September the 12th. As it turned out, I already knew all the works on the program, but I always felt badly that I had missed an entire day of critical practicing by watching news.

Anne Helen Peterson wrote about a similar experience with her writing getting derailed last week in How to Work Through a Coup:

And I was just trying to write a chapter! Imagine people trying to teach high school, or work at a grocery store, or file an insurance claim during an attempted coup! But the logic of capitalism — and the way we’ve internalized its mandates for constant productivity — means there is no pausing for national crisis. The last time the gears actually ground to a stop was 9/11, which was nearly twenty years ago. 

Since then, we’ve worked through smaller terrorist attacks, through financial catastrophes, through literally dozens of mass shootings, through the police killing of unarmed black men and women, through assaults on water protectors at Standing Rock, through seemingly endless causalities of forever wars, through mass foreclosures, through hurricanes and floods and derechos and wildfires, through a pandemic, and through repeated, coordinated attempts to undermine democracy. And when we struggle to perform at peak productivity levels, we feel bad about it.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been finishing an article for a scholarly publication with a deadline of last Friday. Wednesday, January 6 - the day of the attack on the capitol - I had already accomplished a substantial amount of work by the early afternoon. My lists for the day indicate that I checked off 11 items, the only ones being missed were proofreading end notes and a final run-through of the entire paper. But when events started unfolding in the early afternoon, no work got done beyond my online teaching for the day. The next day nothing got done.

My gut reaction, just as on September 11, was that I should consume less news in order to improve my work habits. So many productivity writers always say that staying away from the news can help us to improve mental health, improve work habits, and help maintain focus. But these events are different. These are era-defining moments that define the course of events of years and decades afterwards, and we need to process them in order to understand what is happening in the world.

AHP on the real issue here:

This is the black heart of productivity culture: the maniacal focus on the individual capacity to produce elides the external forces that could (and should!) short-circuit our concentration and work ethic. A hyper-productive person isn’t necessarily a focused person so much as a person who’s often hardened or excused themselves from the needs of their immediate and greater community. There’s a lot to admire about the work of Cal Newport, for example — best known for his books Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, and A World Without Email. But his advice is for an imagined worker who’s been able to insulate themselves from so many demands and distractions. Do the same strategies work for someone navigating the world who is not white, male, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied, with secure citizenship and a stable living situation?

Productivity has become so all-encompassing that not even a terrorist attack on the capital is supposed to derail us. But as artists, our way of working involves processing world events rather than being stuck in an ivory tower and ignoring them. Then again, many classical musicians do precisely that.

Back in 2001, the tour was a memorable one. The first three communities where Judy and I performed were Prince Rupert, Terrace, and Kitimat. The weather could not have been more spectacular, and the drive from Prince Rupert took us through some of the most spectacular mountain and forest scenery in Canada.

But what impressed me most in the concerts that we played that weekend was a deep need for the solace that only music can provide. I’ve never heard audiences so quiet. On a visceral level, they needed the transport and meaning of the works on our program. It felt like a communion between humans and Art, and rare has been the time when I’ve felt that connection so deeply, or the need so great.

Last week on January 6, the two younger kids I taught online knew that something was amiss. They had probably experienced their parents’ worry in front of the TV and on their phones all day, but didn’t understand the depth of what was happening. As a result, they turned into chatterboxes and only wanted to talk about random stuff. I obliged them for the most part, gently leading them back into their piano playing at opportune times. My final student of the evening was an adult, and also needed to talk about the events of the day on a far more serious level. We both fully understood the gravity of what happened, and why art is so important in the human equation.

(Image courtesy of camilo jimenez on Unsplash)