First, thanks to everyone who read yesterday, and I know someone did …
I’ve had this site a long time, and a lot has changed in the duration. I started thinking about definitions, who we say we are, what we think is the “core” of who we are.
As I said yesterday, I work in an office now five, sometimes six days a week. I never thought I’d do that. I thought I would always be able to define myself as “concert pianist” or “piano teacher”. Perhaps I still can because I still do those things. But they aren’t what I do for most of my waking hours anymore.
Sometimes this makes me sad. We make choices because we must always do that. Consider: We have the choice, every day, to get out of bed or not. Really! It’s just that most of us, most of the time, just get up without thinking we’re choosing.
So we choose, and maybe a way down the road we think: “Man, I wish I could go back.”
We can’t, not in the way we think we want to. We’ve changed. I’ve changed. At least for the foreseeable future, because of the choices I have made, I will not be flying overseas to play concerts. I won’t be driving cross-country to exhibit dairy goats. I won’t be learning to shoot from a dear friend in Kansas. (Wait, what?!) OK, I better explain that.
Some people, including me, thought this lady was crazy to teach a totally blind person to shoot. Well, she started. She did the most important part, teaching how to handle a gun safely. Her son was the one who actually taught me to shoot. And now that I’ve done it once, I have no desire to do it again. I know I could if I had to. And I know she wasn’t crazy. She just believed so entirely in my capability as a human being that she didn’t even think twice about teaching me what anyone else would have wanted to learn.
She, more than anyone, exemplifies what I’m trying to say. She didn’t see blindness as my defining characteristic, even if it did have an impact on how I did (and do) a lot of things. She remade me as a pianist, stripping away my whole technique and building it over into something better. Do I wish I was playing more piano these days? Definitely! Will I always have such a crazy schedule that I can’t? Probably not.
So: Our lives are like books. There are chapters. They’re all connected because they’re part of the book. In some cases, our book might seem like more of a collection of short stories. But they’re all connected. The “I” is what connects them, unifies them. The same “I” that kept goats is the same “I” that sits at a desk most weekdays in a downtown office building. The same “I” that went down a spiral staircase in a Prague cathedral doubled over in laughter at my brother’s monkey screeches that frightened a gaggle of British tourists is the same “I” who kept a promise to a friend that she would not die alone in a hospital or a nursing home.
That “I” isn’t something that can be put into words. It’s just the outward circumstances that can be enumerated.
My circumstances now are that I fit my music-making and music teaching into the spaces left after the full-time office thing is done. And on that note I’ll close. I’ve got a bunch of students coming in less than two hours to study for upcoming music exams. We’re going to have a contest to see how many different scales they know. It should be a blast. (Wait, what?!) Yeah, I know, scales aren’t “supposed” to be fun. Well, that’s just the stereotype. But that’s a subject for another post.
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