Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

by Serguey Shinder

There is a song that sat unfinished on my hard drive for the better part of two years. Not because it was bad, but because I could not decide what it was about. The music was there, a chord progression I kept coming back to, a melody that felt like it meant something. But every lyric I wrote sat on top of it like a stranger, technically correct and completely hollow.

I would open the file every few months, add a line, hate the line, and close it again. I told myself I was waiting for inspiration. Really I was waiting to become the kind of person who already knew what the song was about, so I would not have to find out by writing it.

What finally unlocked it had nothing to do with music. I had gone through a small, unremarkable loss, the kind that does not make a story, and one evening I opened the file almost absent-mindedly. This time the words came in the wrong order, ungrammatical, half-finished, and for the first time they belonged to the melody. The song had been waiting for me to have something to put in it, and I had been trying to fake the something for two years.

That taught me a lesson I now recognise everywhere, including in the work I do at a keyboard of a different kind. Some things cannot be forced by effort or technique. They can only be finished when the person doing them has caught up to what the work requires. All the craft in the world will not fill a hole where lived experience is supposed to go.

I do not romanticise this. Waiting is not a virtue, and plenty of unfinished songs are just abandoned ones dressed up as patience. But I have learned to tell the difference between something that is not ready and something I am avoiding. The unfinished song had a pull to it. Every time I opened the file it asked me something. The truly abandoned ideas go quiet.

When I finally recorded it, the whole thing took an afternoon. Two years of stuckness resolved in a few hours, because the missing piece was never technical. It was me. I needed to become someone who had something to say before the saying could happen.

Now, when a piece of music or a piece of work refuses to finish, I ask a different question than I used to. Not "how do I force this," but "what is this waiting for me to understand." Sometimes the honest answer is that I am not ready yet, and the kindest thing I can do is close the file and go live a little more.

– Serguey Asael Shinder