Kelli Trottier's latest CD is called Taking Time. It reflects the need she has found – shared, she believes, by most other people – to carve out time for what is truly important.
She's a singer, songwriter, fiddler and step dancer, and although it all looks seamless when she's performing, those are four separate skills that she needs to take time to practise. She's in a relationship, is a stepmother, and has parents living a couple of hours from her Kingston home, who she tries to see regularly. She's a runner and likes to play soccer. She has e-mails to answer, her website to manage, and the usual array of business and personal tasks.
"We need to take time to make sure we have balance in our lives. We need to carve out the time if it isn't there," she said in an interview.
She found, for example, that many days went by without her practising her music. She would get busy with e-mail and tasks, and the day would pass with the essential element of her career – and her personal passion – forgone. Or she might get to it late in the day, when she was too tired. She's a morning person, but when performing at night before a crowd becomes energized, feeding off the emotional connection. But alone, late afternoon or in the evening, she often neglected to practise.
Now she takes time every morning – an hour most days. And knowing her energy levels, she has done the same thing with her running, fitting it into late mornings. She confesses to not loving running – "I love when the run is over," she says – but relishes the fresh air and the time it allows to be alone with her thoughts. An alternate exercise is step-dancing. She'll open the garage door and enjoy the fresh air and the flat floor as her feet move at lightning speed. Later in the day she can address the e-mails. But first, she must take the time.
She travels a lot but realized she wasn't really seeing and enjoying any place she visited. She was there simply to perform, and rushed off after the gig to return home or to the next locale on her tour. She realized she needed to take time to enjoy life in the places she went. So now she schedules extra time, to truly visit. "I try to appreciate the places I visit," she says.
It's hard to set time to be creative and write songs. She never knows when inspiration might occur. But without scheduling time she finds that the songs don't get written. Three years ago, then 46, she had a brain aneurysm that nearly took away all her time. She recovered faster than the norm, but slower than she wished. The first time she tried to fiddle, her fingers wouldn't work after weeks of idleness, and she cried, fearful the magic was gone.
But she decided – given she couldn't perform – to take time to finish some partly-written songs and write more. The result is the collection of songs on the new CD – its name inspired by the time she carved out to create it. The songs aren't specifically about time, but two are about relationships and she says it's crucial when one ends to take time to put things in perspective. "We don't take time in our lives to reflect," she notes.
The most powerful song is an ode to her father, who had a tractor dealership near his home in Glengarry, Ont., but also farmed on the side all his life, on the same soil his father tilled. But a few years ago, down to a few head of cattle and in his late 70s, he gave up farming. The Cows Aren't Coming Home looks at the seasons of life and of a farm:
But now the hills are lying empty
There's a hole where his heart used to be
There's a crippled old fence and a field, but nothing to see
Oh the hills are lying empty
The grass is overgrown
He knew this day would come like the seasons
The cows aren't coming home
With her life back at full speed, it's still hard to find time to write. She muses about visiting a friend in the Maritimes for a week this fall – the friend works during the day and has a grand piano, so Ms. Trottier imagines herself spending those hours writing new tunes.
In the aftermath of the aneurysm, she found time to read. "It was the first time in my life I gave myself permission to sit and read. I tried to bask in it as long as I could without feeling guilty," she says. She feels she comes by her guilt naturally – she remembers her grandmother, probably 97 at the time, embarrassed at being caught napping in the nursing home. "We all feel it. It's the rat-race thing. There are just too many things to do and you can't get away from the computer and e-mail," she says.
She is convinced that many people are sick because of the overwhelm in their lives and the failure to take time to relax and refresh. She'll see people who are very stressed and then learn they have cancer or are sick. "It doesn't surprise me. I'm not a doctor but it certainly wears you down," she says.
She's a musician. And the message she is sharing is the title of her latest offering, Taking Time.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. He writes Monday Morning Manager and management book reviews for the print edition of Report on Business and an online work-life column Balance. E-mail Harvey Schachter
Harvey Schachter