Follow Your Bliss

It is said that for every person there exists something that is the primary joy of life. Those somethings are highly varied, but each is the 'bliss' that each person follows. For some it might be children, family, career, particular passions such as writing or collecting or sports or ... or ... the list goes on and on.

Mine's a bit other than what you might think. Given I'm a career musician, the natural conclusion would be that my particular bliss is music. But that isn't actually it.

My bliss is home, my home and its evolution, my home and its management, and just being in my home in general. It's something that I inherited from my mother, who formed deep and abiding attachments to her homes, even when those were just cruddy little apartments. For her, home was everything – probably even more than her kids, probably even more than her husband. Certainly she had no interests beyond that. And it was the one thing she was quite good at; her houses were always kept nice and clean and nothing was ever particularly amiss. Oh, she couldn't cook worth a damn and she wasn't great with laundry, either. But the house was always immaculate.

I've picked up the immaculate thing as well. I'm also a good cook and I'm good with laundry. Heck, I'll even iron stuff as necessary. But more to the point, I'm deeply attached to my home and always have been. That went into high gear starting in 2015 when I became a homeowner instead of merely a lowly renter. The stakes went way up in 2015 and my pride in ownership went through the roof. The result is a jim-dandy home that's designed entirely around me and my needs. It's why I am so assiduous about home improvement and upgrading: I can't stand it if something is wrong or not up to full snuff. You want to upset my applecart? Give me a leaky faucet.

I joke sometimes that I've created a lot of places for me to fall asleep in, but that's actually more or less true. I have big comfortable chairs with ottomans on the patio, a reclining wingback chair in the living room, comfortable couches in both the living room and media (TV) room, not to mention my special hideaway side bedroom that is now a library and snuggery. I always start my evening in that room, tucked into a saggy old wingback chair that is somehow terribly comfortable, with nature sounds playing through the room sound system. Invariably I fall asleep in there; some time later I wake up and shuffle off to bed proper. Other people go to bed; I go to chair first and then bed.

This explains part of the audiophile interest, since among the items that I must have for my home to be complete are at least one very good sound system and a vast collection of recordings. These days I have one super-good system, one quite-good one, and two little ones, not to mention headphones that can play off iPads and iPhones, etc. I stream the whole thing off an in-home server running Roon Core, which accesses my ginormous digital library along with my subscriptions to Tidal and Qobuz. Between those, I've got access to damn near everything. It all operates over a slick in-home network with 2.2 gig Internet that runs over 5G/6G WiFi to those places that can't be reached by an Ethernet cable. That's also about home comfort, my comfort, my home.

So the professional musician, the public-facing lecturer and teacher, the busy program note writer, the enthusiastic collector of recordings, the orchestra and conductor wonk – all of that revolves around the central, core love of home. I never get bored at home, never suffer from feeling house-bound. It's all too elemental for my happiness. I could no more get tired of my house than other people could get tired of their child.