August 2025: Balancing Routine with Travel and Career Aspirations

For several weeks now I’ve been back home in Wisconsin, enjoying a summertime routine of working out, cooking, beaching, and practicing on my new viola (all in addition to catching up on the latest season of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City). Being in a routine feels especially good considering I recently wrapped up four busy months of travel and freelancing. For a recap – April was spent touring the east coast of America as the violist of the broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen; May and June involved performances with orchestras in Nashville and Hartford (plus multiple instrument shop visits); and July brought performances in France followed by an epic hiking trip to Peru. As you might imagine, constant travels and sudden job opportunities can make it difficult to find consistency. In this post I reflect on how my standby lifestyle and freelance career have inhibited my search for routine, and I ponder what’s ahead in terms of work and adventures.

To speak first on my career, it’s been many years now that I’ve auditioned for various full-time orchestras, and to no great success. These jobs are few and far between, and are insanely competitive. Amidst my struggles I’ve somewhat lost hope with this dream, a dream that goes back to when I was 13 years old. The work I’ve done lieu of full-time orchestra has comprised of an odd scattering of gigs – cruise ship contracts (pre-covid), touring with bands, and playing with part-time (per-service) orchestras throughout America. Much of this has still been fulfilling, but combined with my frequent leisure travels it has resulted in a dissolving of the routines that have defined more stable periods of my life. I am often called days or weeks ahead of a gig, and there’s typically a travel component involved. When my schedule gets busy, working out has always been the first thing that disappears. Because lets face it, when we’re up and moving locations constantly, the last thing thing on our minds is the gym. Finding routine in my practicing isn’t as difficult when I’m working, but my leisure trips abroad result in weeks or months separated from my instrument. As a professional musician I will admit I’m terribly irresponsible in this regard, but if my colleagues could also fly around the world on standby, I hope they’d do the same!

In this unstable lifestyle I’ve leaned on my solo travels as the one reliable part of my life where I’ve seen growth. This year especially I’ve felt a real shift in my mindset – I now crave longer term stays in countries I’ve previously visited, rather than chasing trips to new countries (I was proud of myself this summer for re-visiting Peru, rather than going to a new country). The whole “place-to-place”, standard backpacker trip is something I’m now trying to move away from, in part so that I can actually better maintain routine whilst having more goal-oriented trips. Do I still want to take multi-stop backpacker trips? Of course! But I’m trying to be more choosy about where I go, and for what duration. Being on trips without my instrument for weeks on end I usually feel a big part of me is missing, and unless I’m in a singular location for a while with a private accommodation it is too risky to travel with my viola.

On a sort of different note, the crazy stuff going on in the U.S. this year has led me again to seek a move abroad. Knowing that I don’t want to pivot careers out of music I have yet to establish a solid plan to leave. There are times I wish I could be content doing any old digital nomad job, but I know from past attempts to dissociate myself from music that I just end up unhappy. On the bright side, there is one opportunity I’ve applied for, which is for a full-time job with the Sun Symphony Orchestra in the capital city of Vietnam. Vietnam was my favorite country having backpacked for three months in SE Asia in 2022, an orchestra job there would be the perfect thing to fulfill my goal of moving abroad with a relevant job in my field. Of course, I never know what the level of competition will be for a job like this, but I figure I might as well try.

There’s also a hybrid lifestyle I’ve considered, which would involve living and working in the US for part of the year and spending one or two larger chunks living abroad. This wouldn’t be too different from how I live now, except for that at the moment all of my jobs are on a substitute basis and I’m rarely sure if or when I will get a call to perform. In September I’m re-auditioning for a tenure track part-time position with the orchestra in Hartford that I already sub with. Shortly after that I’m also auditioning for the South Bend Symphony in Indiana, which operates on a similar part-time schedule. I’m honestly not super keen to spend the coming academic year bouncing between Wisconsin and multiple out of state orchestras again, but there’s also the possibility that I could move to Chicago and use it as a base to fly between gigs.

If these gigs in Hartford and South Bend pan out, I could then arrange my calendar to spend May-September living abroad, and to work part-time during the winter months. As much as I’d love to leave the U.S. permanently I’m aware that remaining here for at least part of the year might be a necessity in order to stay active in my career, otherwise we’ll see what happens with the job in Vietnam. To sum this up, I’ll note that I have a lot of be thankful for with my situation in the US. At the moment being here is working for me – I haven’t hit any snags with the low income free healthcare, the politics haven’t sunk to such a low (knock on wood) that I’d feel the immediate need to leave, work has been plentiful enough to save money, and greatest of all – I still have my parents to lean on. A lot of people here are not in such a fortunate position.