On Thursday nights, I don't worry about a grant renewal or whether the investigator in Pittsburgh will beat me to publication. I worry about whether I practiced enough. When the conductor scolds that we're out of tune, I worry that maybe he's talking about me. What's different about these worries now is that, tinted with nostalgia and filtered through decades of perspective, they come with the comfort of an old pillow. On Thursday nights, I'm not a boss or a mentor, I'm a peon. I'm not expected to know anything other than the music in front of me. It feels great.
DR. WALTER A. BROWN is clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and also at Tufts University in Boston.