Out of Practice

 

This is my piano yesterday morning. Look closely and you will see it. Dust, and a lot of it. Laying on the keys, black and white, like feathers. It's easy to look at the dust and see a reflection of poor housekeeping, and it may indeed be so, but there's more, I think. What I see when I look at the dust on my piano is something between the failure of good intentions and weakness of discipline.

This is the piano I bought two years ago  because I missed having one. I missed the sound and feel of moving my fingers across the keyboard and listening to the rich tones that resulted. I missed Fur Elise and  Greensleeves and the Moonlight Sonata, all of which I knew once, but have mostly forgotten. The hand exercise would be good for my arthritis and the music good for my soul. But somehow, because I once knew how to play these things, I thought they would come back instantly. I can hear the music in my head. Why wouldn't my fingers remember just as easily? 

But it didn't work that way. It didn't work because I didn't practice. I didn't do the very thing I needed to do to make it happen. 

One would think that, by this time we would have figured out some of this out - some of the basic life truths  regarding good and evil, right and wrong. Oh sure, in theory we have. In theory in the world at large, in the great 'they', or in someone else's life. But I don't like those truths when I have to employ them myself. They're hard. They require discipline and focus. The require more than knowledge, more than good intentions. 

In order to play the piano again, I need to actually pay my dues all over again, like with any other learned behavior. I'm out of practice, and it takes practice to do anything well and, eventually, more easily. That's true of exercise, of good eating habits, of learning, of faith habits, and of loving well, as much as it is true of playing piano. It's true of anything worth knowing or living. 

It will take more than a dust cloth to fix this. It will take action. I should have known that all along.

Life after 70, Podcast with David Tracy

 This is a great place to share my own adventure as well as a few nuggets about living life at 70, thanks to my sweet friend, David Tracy--click here!

or click here

Skin

 There is a kind of self-awareness that Descartes, the French Enlightenment philosopher expressed as "Cogito Ergo Sum" or "I think, therefore I am." In the philolosophy world, this phrase is called simply the Cogito for short, forms the basis for a whole school of thought called Rationalism, and is one of the few philosophical declarations that persists into common culture.  

It's a springboard for self-examination and self-study wherein one ruminates upon one's own condition and place in the world. Based on a basic understanding each person exists as a discrete human being, separate from all others, it is the beginning of our understanding of what we call personhood now. 

As one adds years, however, the nature of that awareness changes because, well, we change. Life begins by building and growing, but if one lives long enough, eventually evolves into shedding and simplifying.  The skin is perfect mirror for these changes. When we are young, the skin can barely hold all that we are and do. It is fine and smooth and full of young oil. 

Like a balloon, however, we can't possible continue to expand. Long lives accumulate too many experiences, too much knowledge and understanding, for young skin to contain and the strain of it is reflected there. 

Skin

 Satin yields to crepe as taut and plump dissolves into slack folds,

Accomplished adventure looking for release.

What is done is not left behind but carried,

Years less burden than welcome weight.

Gradual deconstruction remarks survival and triumph -

Allows accumulated pressures to fall away,

Disassembling their hidden gathered strength

Rather than preserving dangerous retention in visible beauty

Until skin can no longer contain it

And gives way in frantic cogito,

Imploding like a star.