Piano...

When I was learning to play the piano as small child, my piano teacher would ask my mom after each class how I managed to stay in mom’s belly for 9 months.  I was impatient with the notes; hurrying, running over notes that were suppose to be held longer… Most of the time, she would teach me short Mozart pieces which bore me a bit after a while ( no offence, I love Mozart) because they were always similar to one another.  Later on, when I was in high school I started to take classes from another teacher who would teach conservatory students and he gave me lots of exercises to begin with and then there came Bach, and Chopin…. The exercises were good for me but also the complexity of Bach…  made me concentrate wholly…  Afterwards, the first year and a half of college I was at Grinnell, where we could take 30-minute piano classes once a week for a mere hundred bucks during each semester.  Being in Iowa, which could be utterly boring if you weren’t a pot smoker, I began practicing every day for an hour.  There, I really began to play the piano … I was totally absorbed during those one-hour time slots in the piano room.  There were 4 or 5 piano rooms we could sign up for, and two of them had grand Steiner pianos which I loved playing…  The amazing thing was that, with minimum instructions (30 min a week), but with daily practice, I played the piano at my best… and I guess at that point I also learned to be more patient with the notes that were suppose to be held longer…

Now, time to time, I get excited about playing the piano again.  Now I have no piano, but maybe a keyboard, which is similar to a piano, can do the job…  However, I am sure to be very rusty since it has been years…  I have to go to basics to become quick with reading the notes again and then some drills to get quick with my fingers and then start playing some pieces of music…  This is one of my dreams… why?  Because I love music and I know that it is one of the things which makes me totally absorbed.., so very meditative.

Why am I writing all this?  Perhaps there is more than one reason…  One of them is seeing how impatient I can be which reminds me my childhood piano teacher and the book KA where it is written “...that impatience is the only sin” and the other thing is the Mysore room which is when it is full, makes me totally absorbed, total like when I used to play the piano.  I also have a dream that one day things will become more steady in my life… where I will be living in a more natural environment with a beloved, teaching yoga together, and perhaps there will be space for a piano like keyboard in one corner of our home… I hope this is not a mere dream but a possibility… I wish for this with my whole heart.