The Time I Had An Existential Crisis About Singing In A Community Choir

Back in January I wrote that I had rejoined the Prairie Singers choir for their spring season, but I’ve realized that I never did continue the story of how that went for me. At the time, I wrote:

“it remains to be seen whether my other life stuff will interfere with my practices and performance, but I was advised last year not to stop doing the things I love because I might have to quit them at some point. We don’t know! So I’m going to try and assume the best.”

Well, the concert has come and gone and I…was not a part of it. I was in the audience instead, loving the music even if I was occasionally sobbing quietly.

When rehearsals started out I had a difficult time enjoying myself. I can sing capably enough (I’m a 2nd tenor, if you’re curious) but just barely read music by sight, so I rely quite a bit on those around me to keep pace when learning a song. And, our choir director is someone who likes to challenge his groups, so the early going was quite difficult and slow-going for me. On top of all that, I was getting over a cold when rehearsals started, so my vocal range was impacted and I was frustrated by that as well.

A few rehearsals in and I still wasn’t ‘feeling it’. The previous year’s choir rehearsals had been challenging as well, but energizing! Where was that feeling? Then, the even bigger questions started setting in. I was pretty sure that my surgery date was going to be before the concert in March, so was there really a point to continuing if I wouldn’t get to take part in the finished product? And then I started thinking about space.

I took this slightly blurry picture of the moon a few days ago, through the lens of a friend’s powerful telescope. This friend runs the local astronomy club and gets absolutely fired up about interstellar topics, which is interesting and fun to chat about. But, it’s also thanks to him that I’ve been gaining a new appreciation of just how incomprehensibly vast space is, and how relatively tiny we are.

I’m coming back around to my story, I promise! But I also want to properly plug my friend Kenton’s Pembina Valley Astro Club which just kicked off the 2025 season! What follows in my story is not his fault. Anyway, tell him I sent you, and if you have some time, ask him where the tungsten in my wedding ring comes from and buckle up 😄

So, my thinking spiralled from: why am I not enjoying myself at choir? To, why am I bothering with this at all? Which became, we’re so insignificant and life is so short, so why bother with…anything? I’ll admit that being between cancer treatments and major abdominal surgery likely had something to do with my downer headspace. Kenton says he has a friend that calls this mode of thinking “The Maw”, after the sort of philosophical chasm that can open up beneath you when you start to go down this road.

Lots of folks have lots of different answers to these kinds of questions. I came around to a better place eventually, aided by the choir rehearsals that started the whole thing. This might not make a lot of sense, but I remembered two main things. One is that it’s all relative. We’re tiny compared to the solar system, but our bodies are galaxies to the cells inside of us. Thinking about this was a way to sort of recenter myself, and lead into the second thing; what we do with our time here matters, to us and to others, right now.

I know that in a hundred years, probably nobody will remember this particular season and concert of the Prairie Singers. But, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile for me to do. This is my one go at living life here on planet earth, and when I really think about it, I’m not going to sit around doing absolutely nothing, affecting nobody, making nothing, and expending no energy, just because it might fade from memory one day. I definitely shouldn’t have had kids if I expected to just sit quietly in a room and wait for the afterlife. I’m gonna live.

Accepting this means it isn’t feasible, or really any fun, for me to sit in the constant knowledge that we’re motes of dust dancing in a ray of sunlight. So I had to set that aside, and decide for myself that things like choirs matter because of the time and energy we invest in it. Things…got better from there. Rehearsals started to feel better. Still challenging, but at one point a really beautiful piece of music clicked while we were working on it, and I mentally stepped back from the song and marvelled at the beauty of this group of people making art together.

I got my surgery date and exited at the last rehearsal before the 20th, which was also the best and most energizing one I’d done this season. However, I didn’t want to stress about missing practices due to recovery, and I knew I’d try to push myself too hard to rejoin the choir if I tried to say I’d be back. I was deeply pleased to be able to attend the concert, however, and got to finally see how the pieces we struggled with had come together. And yes, I really did cry more than once, not only because of the beauty of the music, but because of the layered feelings around the experience.

This has been: The Time I Had An Existential Crisis About Singing In A Community Choir. Please enjoy this picture of my children getting mad at Super Mario Bros. 3. (There are two of them because I was also testing a Raspberry Pi computer running a Nintendo emulator, and they are not great at taking turns)