Both sport and music rely on a degree of public performance. If you’re a perfectionist, like I am, and if you realise, as I do, that your perfectionism is a basic displacement therapy in a world where you’re seeking to impose your own order on the random chaos of the universe while knowing, deep down, that such an action is inherently futile, then sport and instruments hold all sorts of hidden dangers for you. You can’t control how someone else hits the ball to you, or the wind speed or court conditions on any given day and there is nowhere to hide when you split a trumpet note or miss an
...more
