It's funny the places I get random revelations/thoughts-about-life. They generally occur at an unearthly hour of the night while I scribble away in my journal and highlight verses in my Bible...or they occur while I'm lost - or perhaps, not *entirely* lost - in my piano practice.
This post is a result of the latter.
I don't like practicing piano that much. Occasionally I manage to get really into it, but more often than I would like to admit, I'm just watching the clock. There's this little timer that sits on the side of the piano, and sometimes I just play my piece and watch it tick.
But I also play this game with myself, and so far I've only won once. (yes, after almost 12 years of piano) This game consists of me trying to time the last few seconds of my piece so that I end right as the clock does. Like - right as the clock does.
So I have this gorgeous piece by Faure, which has a lot of really weird sounds and flowy things that aren't really that complicated, but takes a bit of wrestling to really get down - and I have yet to accomplish this.
I was quite focused for all my practice time until around the last 60 seconds, where I decided to see if I could play the entire Faure and finish it right as the clock does.
So as I was playing it, I started watching the little black pixels countdown - and of course, lost my place in the music, which caused me to have to slow down, find my place again, and thus I lost a good 5 seconds of time and of course didn't finish it anywhere near the time the timer was done counting, because I had estimated wrong to begin with.
But I thought...how often do we do that in life? Being so focused on how long until this or how many more years till we can do this or when this might happen and thinking and dreaming about this...we watch the clock of our lives and lose our place in the music, forgetting that the one who composed the song will have it end exactly where He wants it. But if we focused on the music in front of us, what God has given us right there in our faces...maybe struggle through some parts and float through others, perhaps we'll find that the time has passed after all...and instead of impatiently waiting, we can complete the piece with satisfaction and fulfillment - and then move on to what He has in store next.
Maybe I'm stretching the analogy a bit, but hey. I never said music practice was a sane process, now, did I?
::grins::
That is how I practice violin- watching the clock. In fact, that's often how I evaluate myself on school- how long I spend on it. I can take this lesson/analogy to heart. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI love this! I've been chewing on that concept recently, and I like having an analogy to go along with it.
ReplyDeleteI think it's those of us that adore planning that tend to struggle with this more- we try so hard to figure out if God wants us to do this or that, and we run from one thing to another, trying to get Him to tell us which thing to head to next, so we can throw all of our energy into preparing for it so we get it just right. (And on our super obsessive days, we just go ahead and plan out EVERYTHING!) But like you said, God is much more interested in us than He is in what we accomplish, and we (or at least, I) get so distracted from Him in the middle of all of the planning. Something I need to work on. . .