When you are in high school you cannot imagine how anything you are doing in school could possibly have any effect on your real life. Sure, your parents and guidance counselors try to steer you toward choices that will have an impact on your eventual paycheck, and in those too-rare moments of intellectual lucidity you know they are right, but it still just seems like an amazing waste of time.

Of course, there are those times that the ongoing events become the tipping points on which all human history will depend. You know what I mean — your girlfriend publicly dumps you for your best friend, you can't get tickets to the big concert and everyone else in school is going to be there, there is a zit the size of a grape on your forehead and you have a date tonight — those kind of crises. Nothing anyone can say will convince you that your life is not officially over.

But for all the melodrama and teen-aged angst inherent in our biology and social structure, there are still moments on which our lives do pivot. Sometimes it is as simple as meeting a special person, someone like an an extraordinary teacher, one who pushes your mind in new directions. Sometimes it's a painful event, the sudden and tragic death of a classmate demonstrating the impermanence of life. And occasionally it's an opportunity to taste something new and marvelous, something unexpected and strange, something that integrates itself into your essence so thoroughly that you spend the rest of your life trying to get it back.

In addition to my involuntary membership in various other outcast subcultures, I was a band geek. I lived for music, and played in the marching band, concert band, and stage band, as well as singing (very badly) in the chorus. By the time my senior year came around nearly all my classes were either music or English (at the time, my second passion). I was writing original songs and arrangements, studying music theory, and playing lead trombone in all the bands (as well as doubling on other instruments). This was clearly where I was going in life.

But socially I was a non-entity; outside of those nerdish circles I doubt anyone even knew my name. This didn't bother me, because my love of music had led me to an early understanding of ensemble responsibilities — they also serve, who sit and play back-up. Nonetheless, on some subconscious level I wanted more. I needed a way to express myself in a more personal fashion.

At the time MacArthur Park was quite popular among high school bands. It had been almost ten years since the release of the Richard Harris original, but a few years earlier big band leader and music educator Maynard Ferguson had released a jazz-rock version which — when "dumbed down" for high school ensembles — was quite popular. When our band decided to add it to the repertoire, the band director tapped me to rehearse and conduct it at our winter concert.

I was enthusiastic, to say the least, and that carried over to the band. It's a fairly complex piece for pop music, telling a shifting story in moods and colors, but I worked them pretty hard and we got it down cold. And then, it was show time.

It will come as no surprise that I was absolutely terrified when I walked up to the podium in the cafeteria where our concert was staged. I had performed there dozens of times in the past four years, and a room full of band parents isn't exactly the toughest crowd; nonetheless, I knew a lot was hanging on this. I picked up the thin stick of fiberglass, raised my arms, smiled at the flute players, and gave the downbeat.

Many philosophies will tell you that enlightenment is the dissolution of ego, the cessation of conscious thought, existing only in the moment. It is suggested that through long study and meditation you can achieve the bliss of such a state for a while, and many people spend their lives searching for it. After giving that downbeat, for the next seven minutes I was a Zen master. I was merely guiding a bunch of high school kids through a performance of a pop song with ridiculous lyrics, but my entire existence was vibrating through the cold air of that lunchroom. There was no Marc Kevin Hall — I was just the conduit for a song, communicating my still ill-defined hopes and dreams and passions through music.

As the arrangement built toward its inevitable and bombastic climax, those final few chords, I started to come back into myself. All the energy in those kids — my friends, my classmates — was pouring through me and into the audience. I was almost giddy from the palpable force surrounding me, the raw power, a sensation to which I was wholly unaccustomed.

I brought it to the last melodramatic moments, the final chord with screaming brass and wild percussion and made them hold it, and hold it, making eye contact with them all, exhorting each to push one more time, and damned if they didn't do it. They trusted me. And with a quick motion of my hand I cut them off, then paused, and let my arms fall to my sides.

My ears were ringing, so I didn't notice it, at first. All of my focus had been on preparing the ensemble for this moment, this one performance; I had never given thought to what might come after. So when I turned and saw the room full of people standing and clapping and cheering, louder even than the music had been, I was at a loss. I bowed and then turned to walk off stage, and Rick Miles, the band director, pushed me back out. I smiled at them, not knowing what else to do, then bowed again, and then noticed that the band, too, was on its feet.

In the midst of all this, I reached a moment of insight. These people were cheering and clapping for me because I had managed to reach them. Some small part of what I was feeling had traveled though the music, though my efforts, and touched people I didn't even know, and they knew it. The essential and pure joy coursing through me came from being understood, from reaching someone else, from communicating with another person through art. This, I knew without question, was what I was meant to do.

That was the only time I ever conducted an ensemble in public. Several times I was a featured soloist, and I composed some works during my failed attempt at college, but within three years my musical career was basically over, a victim of real life. Over the years I often felt I'd never know that rush again, that incredible sense of completion, of doing what I was meant to do in this world.

Over time, though, I learned that it wasn't about the music, or the conducting, or even being the nexus of so much energy and hope and trust. It was the connection I felt with the world, the electric force flowing through me, and knowing that at that moment, in that place, I was the pivot on which this story turned.

For thirty years I've sought after that feeling again, occasionally coming close. I've gone from being a geeky young kid lacking any self-awareness at all, to being... well, a geeky and self-aware old guy. But the part of me that was roused when I picked up that baton has stayed with me, changing with my interests and circumstances, but always striving to reach people and make them laugh, cry, understand, feel. My medium may change, but the creative force never dies; I'll always be a storyteller.