Song of Life

So, I was thinking today, playing piano can be a great metaphor for the way people live their lives. We may hear someone else play a piece that sounds so beautiful, so effortless, so easy and think we can just pick it up and be tickling the ivory with no practice at all, for some that may be true but that only comes after years and years of study but for the average passive player it's not so true. When we sit down to our 'easy, beautiful, effortless' piece of music we realize there is a multitude of sharps, flats, ties, slurs and everything else. We realize that it's not as easy as we thought...there are two options in front of us...quit or work hard to master it. Alot of people simply quit and move on to something else, settle for something else. We've all done it, but does it really bring happiness to settle for mediocrity? As I've always said, the best things in life were never meant to be easy, or else they wouldn't mean anything.

Now, when we're learning that dream song we all have to be careful that we're practicing it the correct way. If we practice the song with a C where there is supposed to be a D flat or practice putting the wrong emphasis on notes, it might not only sound bad but it could be a hard habit to break. Our fingers and brains get so used to hitting those mistakes after just a few practices that when you go to correct the mistakes it's almost like starting over. If only you had practiced the song the right way from the beginning. It's the same in life, once we start making mistakes and getting used to making those mistakes it gets harder and harder to fix them. We get so set in our ways that we begin to think the mistakes are actually part of the song. We don't recognize the mistakes as mistakes anymore. That's when things get dangerous because the first step to fixing misdeeds is recognizing them. All it takes is one jarring note to make an entire song sound simply like a cacophony of sound, not beauty.

One of my absolute favorite songs. This man is a genious and so talented. I'm sure he spends hours playing, practicing and having fun with his love of music. If only everyone held such a passion about something.