Coming to a Windward Choral Society rehearsal always involves the same process: sign in, grab any new music that might be handed out, greet all the gang and settle in to make some music. There’s always a laugh or two and it’s dang near impossible to find someone who isn’t smiling.

Try adding an internalized picture to this. As you leave your car and walk across the parking lot, think about the day you had. For me, that was spent in an office with computer screens staring back at me (while the computer made a point of not doing anything the way I told it to), trying to squeeze ten hours of meetings into an eight hour day and spending a great deal of time sitting in my car surrounded by the entire population of Oahu zooming happily towards Kailua at a maximum speed of I-didn’t-know-a-car-could-go-this-slow-without-actually-stopping.

Before you grab the clipboard to sign in, take all that noise and put it into a piece of luggage in your mind, however big that would need to be to hold it all. (Mine would definitely not fit in the overhead bin; I suspect yours wouldn’t either.) When you get to the door of the rehearsal hall, check it in. In your mind, hand it to the smiling person at the customer service counter and let them stick it on the conveyor belt and watch it disappear through those rubber flappy things that cover the hole in the wall. Bye bye. See ya’ later.

Now you’ve passed through the door unencumbered by the luggage. You’re ready to make some music by putting every brain cell to work on it and you’ll find yourself energized and smiling and having a spectacular two hours of joyful expression. And I suspect that, when you back to the door, you’ll find that your luggage has been lost somewhere.

Go ahead and let the customer service person apologize, that’s their job. Just don’t let them see the silly grin on your face.