I have been reading about university enrolment declining. It makes sense people question it: the expense, the debt, the uncertain employment afterward, and the assumption that institutional recognition is the measure of serious learning. I returned to school and completed a master’s degree and a PhD. People respond as though I climbed The Chief in Squamish wearing a piano. They say it is an enormous accomplishment. I understand. There were books, deadlines, arguments, presentations, administrative puzzles and repeated encounters with formatting requirements capable of crushing the human spirit. Fuck did it ever crush mine but it is over.

I am glad I did it but I did not conquer the greatest mountain of my life. Nothing there was as difficult as trying to cross Canada repeatedly and measuring whether or not I have a career. No special prize for enduring the panic for a Montreal promoter to answer an email. No honorary doctorate driving eight hours through snow, killing a rabbit (was that what it was?) unloading equipment, discovering the promised piano has three dead notes, audience of seventeen people as if they were two hundred, selling merchandise, loading the car again and finding something to eat after every restaurant closed.

You must write songs, rehearse them, record them, finance them, release them, promote them, then explain to strangers why they should care, all while trying to preserve the fragile part of yourself that wrote songs in the first place. You be booking agent, publicist, accountant, grant writer, travel agent, road manager, producer, sound tech and social-media department. Learn to perform when you are tired, ill, or in pain. Learn to determine from an unfamiliar room what the audience needs within minutes. Learn to hold their attention, or to continue after a joke dies in public. Learn how to abandon your clever idea when it damages the song, how to disagree without poisoning the tour. How to share a small vehicle with someone whose relationship to punctuality is ….experimental.

Learn rejection in every form. The festival says no. The label declines. The agent is silent. The review misunderstands the work. The audience stays home. The promoter lost money. The grant jury decides someone else’s dream is more urgent. You continue the next morning not because continuing guarantees success, but stopping guarantees the opposite. Performing life teaches endurance, invention, negotiation, humiliation, recovery and the necessity of making decisions without sufficient information. Academia tested whether I could satisfy its requirements. A life in music repeatedly tests whether I can create the requirements.