Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Falling forward

The reason I like Ann Voskamp so much is that she shares her struggles with her readers. Ann is the best-selling author of One Thousand Gifts, a book about writing down at least three things every day for which you are grateful. She remembers in today's post at A Holy Experience a night in 2012 when her daughter Hope played a piano recital. Hope made some missteps, but kept on moving forward to the next bar. At the end the "adjudicator" of the performance said to her,

“Do you know what you did so perfectly right, Hope?”

Right? Hope looks down at the floor, shakes her head. Hope’s whole body is saying it: Right? What about any of this was perfectly right?

The adjudicator bends a bit to find Hope’s eyes, tries to pull her up with her smile. “So you forgot some notes! Fear and old habits and people pressure and your own interior playlist can do that — to all of us. But! When the piece started to fall apart? You fell forward, Hope. You didn’t fret about the music behind you — you focused on the next bar.”

Hope had nodded slowly, like a dawning, smiling.

The adjudicator looked down the row of girls and budding pianists and said it with this steady beat.“We are all going to botch it some days. We all sometimes get the notes wrong. But the song only goes wrong when we keep thinking back to the wrong notes."

“When a piece starts to fall apart — fall forward. Fall forward into the next bar. Moving forward is what makes music.“

Read more here: http://www.aholyexperience.com/2013/01/when-you-dont-want-a-new-year-but-a-new-you-camera-giveaway/

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