In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities,
in the expert's mind, there are few. –Suzuki Roshi
By age four or five, life becomes focused on mastery. We learn to ride a bike, field a ball, read, subtract, and on and on. The hours of exploring and experimenting and imagining become limited. During the school year they dwindle down to nearly nothing.
Enter music. For the past six months Liam has been taking piano lessons. One might imagine that piano would be one more thing to master. One more constrained and tedious activity. It could be, I'm sure, but we discovered Miss Carol, the most wonderful piano teacher, and she has been teaching Liam something far more important than the technicalities of the instrument. She has been nurturing his creative and experimental soul. She has been opening up a world of musical possibilities.
What Miss Carol does is both simple and unique: she appreciates. Liam sits throughout the entire lesson - other than the times he is actually playing a piece he has practiced during the week - and plays around composing little runs and flourishes. Miss Carol might be writing in his notebook or putting a sticker on a piece he's successfully completed, but she is always listening to what Liam's making up. Sometimes it's dissonant, sometimes melodic. Sometimes sweet, sometimes wild. She never tells him to stop. She notices interesting note combinations and points them out. She sits back and shakes her head like she's amazed at what he's doing. She tells me I should record him. I can tell she wants to bottle what he's doing. He is not trying to get something right. He's doing something far better, something he's hardly allowed to do anymore, something so essential to discovery and expression. He's creating something inspired, something new.
But here's the thing. My son is not a Mozart. He doesn't sit down and whip out a sonata. But he has passion and interest and incredible creativity. And no one has ever tried to correct his free-flowing ideas. Music just pours out of his heart and is edited by his own ear. On the piano, when he's composing, he beats to his own drummer, and it's heaven to him.
With Miss Carol, who is a very accomplished composer, he is learning technique, but not for the purpose of mastery. He's collecting tools he can eventually use to enhance his creativity and expand his expression. I can see how easy it would be to make piano one more thing to master, to squash that beautiful imagination for the sake of perfection. Instead, we have a teacher who is nurturing all the possibilities held in my passionate little beginner. A teacher who recognizes the joy he exudes when he plays. A teacher who knows what would be lost if she made him sit up straight and only play what's on the page.
When everything else is becoming boring or tedious or too hard for a six year old whose days are packed with things to learn and accomplish, the piano saves us. May it never become another thing to master.
