digging around

On Friday I took delivery of a hired piano.   To those of my friends who read this blog, I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude for the ongoing inspiration.  I don’t need to read celebrity mags or biographies of famous people – I only need to look to the “extra” ordinary people in my life for wonderful ideas and motivation.

In this instance, my own husband has been ‘aimlessly strumming’ his second hand guitar – like a meditation – for years.  I have one friend who has picked up the violin after a few decades of *not* picking it up, and another friend who has recently bought a piano and intends to learn.    I am inspired.  

I was one of those children who was *forced* to learn the piano as a child.   It was not a happy time.   I could not have wanted to practice any less.  The lessons were torture (as I hadn’t practiced enough).  The exams were times of the most intense pressure and desperation.  On one occasion I broke into silent heaving sobs over the keyboard as I tried to play.  The examiner was horrified, and passed me as an act of kindness.  By the time my parents were convinced that I *really* wasn’t enjoying it, and decided a different, “no exams” type teacher might suit, I had been ruined for it.  I couldn’t play for pleasure.  It just wasn’t a pleasure.  It was, finally, a pleasure when I was allowed to stop.

Of all the things I learnt at piano lessons (and it wasn’t a complete waste – I can still read basic music) the most powerful and enduring lesson was that I “wasn’t musical”.   For decades, I never sang aloud – only miming in the obligatory school choir.   I never touched, let alone tried to play, a musical instrument. 

How often our culture’s connection between ‘learning’ and external ‘achievement’, ruins our pleasure in learning and discovery.  How often the thing you *have* to learn, becomes the very thing you are resistant to learning.  How often we self select out of things, because we won’t be as good as we “should” be.

It was only with the arrival of my children that I was prepared to sing, to ”have a go” on the toy xylophone, or blow into the harmonica.   In my determination that the world of music should be open to them, I was forced to the conclusion that, by default, it had to be open to me.   As is so often the case, your children, just by being, give you that “second chance”. 

I started to get a bit rebellious that my experiences had given me such a negative label.   That this whole field of human endevour and culture had been closed to me.  I determined that even though I would never be a great  musician, the world of music was as much mine to explore, as it was anyone else’s.

When the piano arrived, I didn’t dare play a note without music in front of me.   I raced to my mum’s to borrow some sheet music.   Of course the irony is that now, when I am so excited about the piano, and want to practice SO MUCH, I barely get a chance.  Oh well.  Better to yearn to do something, than be forced.