A conversation with some folks about ‘the greater good’ brought a familiar knot to my gut. Do you ever feel it, too? Feel the ‘shields going up’ kind of reaction? Why is that?
Happens when I am presented with something that somehow feels like it is going to cost me something and I’m not sure what. At times it feels like I am being asked to take on a new belief, or worse, exchange mine for theirs.
Other times I am sure of what my hesitation is about. It’s about the next conversation, inevitable though brief, suggesting that I am somehow not interested in ‘the greater good.’ “But, but you haven’t yet heard my version of what that all means to me!”
So, I love it when I find myself in an environment where there is just community and everything that gets stirred up……like a re-connection with an inner peace that I definitely feel to be part of the ‘greater good.’
A couple days ago I had the privilege…….and I must emphasize it as having been a definite privilege……to attend an evening with my 10-year-old grand daughter at her piano recital.
First, let me be clear about that evening. There were no competitions and ‘awards’, no critiques by any ‘well-meaning’ adjudicators or such, that might further stifle any participant. Therefore, in my eyes it was an evening of pure and simple wonderment!
Who was it that suggested (in a book on my shelf), that ‘we are not here to play music perfectly but to love music dearly’? (Stephanie Judy, Making Music for the Joy Of It)
Somewhere around 65 students, some as young as 7 or 8 and on up into the teens for others, shared anywhere from 20 seconds to several minutes of themselves.
You see, here was the beauty of it all….
‘there was nothing for us to do but to receive the offerings of those precious souls as they shinnied up onto a piano stool that seemed so high, or who fumbled with an unfamiliar microphone, in order, through a mixture of apprehension and vulnerability, to speak themselves through music and song.’
Now, for those of us who are ‘permanent amateurs’ we do not sit at our piano or pick up our guitar with the expressed purpose of making a difference on the planet, and yet……
In Gerald W. Johnson’s words, “I dare to think it is a gracious gift that enables the … musician to believe in a magic that can bring order and beauty into the world.”
As I watched and listened to young musician after musician (yes, they are musicians, all of them!) move to the front of the room, as they were greeted with our joyful applause,
I said a silent prayer that no one would ever decide for them, that they should not continue to play throughout their whole lives!
And how many of us parents have thoughts racing through our minds about our own first few stumbling notes on any instrument and somehow hope we can carry on our own musical dreams through our children.
Many of us have stopped playing, but in our minds there is the forever little flicker of ‘maybe yet’ or ‘if only’ that keeps a shadowy longing alive.
Catherine Drinker Bowen (as quoted by Helen Spielman) understood: “I know what these people want; I have seen them pick up my violin and turn it over in their hands. They may not know it themselves, but they want music, not by the ticketful, the purseful, but music as it should be had, music at home, a part of daily life, a thing as necessary, as satisfying as the midday meal. They want to play. And they are kept back by the absurd, the mistaken, the wicked notion that in order to play an instrument one must be possessed by the bogey called Talent.”
To live in a world community where we can hear each other through music, where we can heal each other with music, where music dissolves those artificial barriers we believe we must build to keep us secure…….now that would really matter because it would truly be ‘for the greater good’ don’t you think?
Rich
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