The Seasons of an Artist

For the longest time I operated under the assumption that growth followed some kind of straight, logical line. Practice leads to progress, progress leads to clarity, clarity leads to momentum. When I was younger, that belief felt almost moral. If something wasn’t working, I assumed I wasn’t working hard enough. If a stretch felt dull or directionless, I assumed I was falling behind someone who “had it all figured out.”

It has taken me decades to admit that none of that is true. My life in music has never moved in a line. It has moved in seasons. Some come roaring in with energy and color and velocity. Some creep in like fog, obscuring my sense of direction. Some feel like abundance. Some feel like deficit. And none of them ask for my permission.

The performance seasons are the easiest to misunderstand. From the outside it can look like motion, accomplishment, affirmation. The lights, the travel, the checks clearing. But internally it can feel strangely thin. You might be playing a lot, but you are not necessarily changing. You are maintaining, surviving, delivering. A lot of what people call “momentum” is really just velocity.

Then there are the winter seasons. The ones nobody wants to talk about. The ones you can’t post your way out of. Those stretches when the calendar is mostly empty squares and you’re left with your practice, your doubts, and the long quiet stare at the instrument you thought you understood. In my twenties I mistook those periods for failure. In my thirties I tried to outwork them. By my forties I realized something else was happening. Winter was where the real rebuilding lived. Winter was where technique got cleaned up, where old assumptions cracked open, where new questions finally had the space to breathe.

Some of my deepest seasons of growth have arrived when life outside the music was falling apart. The bow arm remembers everything. Rejuvenation and grief, money and debt, love and loss. My time-feel has tracked my nervous system more faithfully than any journal I’ve ever kept. There were months when picking up the violin felt like trying to play underwater. And yet even those stretches fed the long arc toward the musician I’m still becoming. I kept showing up. Not to be brilliant. Just to stay in conversation with myself.

I don’t control these seasons, and I don’t always understand them while I’m in them. But I trust them now in a way I never could before. When things are open and bright, I push. I take bigger swings. When things are heavy and slow, I simplify. I return to basics. I keep small promises and build from there. Both states have their own wisdom. Both do necessary work.

If you’re in a bright season, expand. If you’re in a cold one, don’t mistake it for decline. You’re not behind. You’re not being erased. You’re in season. Every musician who has endured has learned to recognize their own weather. And the longer I do this, the more I see that the seasons I once dreaded were the ones quietly making me more durable, more awake, and more myself.