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A few months ago my wife told me she wanted us to join a community choir.

I said great, you should do it. She has a beautiful voice. She was a theatre major. I taught myself guitar off YouTube and still can’t read a note of music, let alone sing. She signed us both up anyway.

There are 90 people in this choir. Most of them have been singing for years, and some are genuinely excellent. Then there’s me. I’m the weak link and everyone within ten feet of me knows it.

We rehearse once a week. Saturday night we do two public performances. Old R&B tunes. One of them is “Love Train,” which is a hard song to stand still for, and I’m counting on that to cover a few of my notes.

What’s struck me is how loud the internal resistance has been. Walking into that first rehearsal, my body reacted the way it does when something feels threatening. Tight chest. A strong urge to find a reason to skip next week.

Nothing was actually wrong. It was just unfamiliar, and it was in public.

I spend my working life helping traders understand that the brain will often defend the familiar over the possible, even when the familiar is costing them. It’s a different thing entirely to feel that from the back row of the baritone section.

I’m still not a good singer. I may never be. But I’ve stopped needing a reason to quit, and I didn’t expect that to happen this fast.

Saturday should be interesting.