I can’t do it! I overhear my older daughter slam her hands on the keys releasing a somewhat satisfying cacophony. She’s learning a new song and is caught at a place where the notes, her fingers, and her mind are each sitting in different bowls, the way ingredients do before coming together. Ms. Erica always performs the final piece once so Charlotte knows where she’s headed; the fullness of the melody is playing in her mind as her fingers fumble over the keys. And isn’t that the frustration, the sheer overwhelm? When we know the beauty of the whole, yet all we experience is the fragmented sum of its parts. Note by note, measure by measure, I remind her, preaching to myself.
I wonder if perseverance can only happen this way, step by step in bite-size pieces so that the seeming impossibility doesn’t consume us. Maybe smalling is more important now than ever before, when the promise of the final song is so often at odds with our day-to-day reality. As we enter the busiest time of year and look ahead to all that’s coming in the next, this is what I’m holding onto - fixing my gaze on what I’ve been given, note by note, measure by measure, hopeful that as each of us does the same, we’re compositing together the melody we hear in our hearts.
Onward,
Pat
