Page 121 - MN

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Golf is hard, because when you make a change it feels awful. You've grooved your mistake and the cure feels like a horrible move. I know, because a few months ago I took video of my swing and immediately saw a couple of major flaws. When I correct them, it feels like I'm swinging an axe. Hence the expression, "Feel isn't real".
In life, we all do the same thing. We make the same mistakes over and over and the corrections feel very strange. I see people who talk way too much and have no clue that they're doing it. Hell, I might be one of them. I know I spent a couple of weeks trying to speak less and it was a revelation. I do talk too much!
I think a lot of people fail for those reasons. Change feels wrong. It's hard to do. Much easier to stay in your rut and wonder why other people are more successful. In my job, audiences let you know immediately if you were screwing up and that was a good thing. There was no mercy. If you did bad shows, you knew immediately. You had to change or die.
Years ago I read about opera singers, where someone tried to find the difference between the big stars and the mediocre singers. You know the surprising result? Volume. Not loudness, but the differences in volume. Great opera singers went from very soft to very loud and back again. Mediocre opera singers didn't vary their volume as much.
I learned that on bad nights on stage. When you get scared, you move towards a monotone. You close up when you should be opening up.
And you can err in both directions. The worst teacher I had in high school just had one volume. Loud. It was flat-out boring. Shy people talk softly, and become uninteresting because they never pump up the volume. Check out the great rock anthems, and I think you'll find they go from very quiet to very loud. Stairway to Heaven and Bohemian Rhapsody spring to mind.
This is a hard day of writing for me because my mind is all over the place. Awee, Jintana's niece, knocked and came in for a few minutes. She is the most cheerful person I've ever been around and I needed that. She doesn't walk, she dances, and finds joy in all things. She's gone now and it's like a light went out of the room. What a good little interlude that was.
What makes a good show? You know, for thousands of years people have been putting on plays, concerts, dances, and let's think of the venues that have evolved. Theaters. Theaters have generally the same shape, with a stage, a bunch of seats facing the stage, maybe balconies with seats facing the stage, and lighting that lights up the stage while the rest of the theater is dark. For me a theater with good sound and lights was perfect. I used to love being on stage with a spotlight on me, the audience in darkness, a great sound system and good acoustics. I loved having the light in my eyes because I didn't want to see the audience, I wanted to