Music Lesson

Music lessons make a person very attentive to absolutely everything but the music they are playing – and most attentive approximately ten minutes after leaving the lesson.
An out of brain experience is often a sign that you are either playing so well that you don’t notice your outstanding ability, or that your mind has wandered so atrociously you haven’t noticed the errors.

After lessons your walk is different, the precision and the interpretation of your gait becomes a sensitive point. And because you are now allowed to look left and right not straight ahead or back in at your own brain you now notice other things, other people. And the way the affect meaning for you becomes so much more acute.

Three boys dressed as lackadaisically as they most obviously are scholastically inclined are throwing switchblade knives into the lawn of a small business. This does not lead to the stereotypical worry of my wellbeing and safety – but the wonder at entertainment and imagination for young people in a suburb area with not even a grocery store at which they could ogle chocolate and pop. The world at any place is never an adequate space for an adolescent to call home. We are all lacking and searching for better things – and so where we once were is not where we will end up unless some great light has been shed on its multi dimensional spectrums. And this is how the world shifts and is balanced – for the most part.

Further down the road – not something worth much observation but that a young child’s legs are so severely deformed they were bunched beneath his body, leaving but two inches between his crotch and the floor. He walked like a penguin. It is not with pity that I notice him, but the unique and permanent human shape he creates. He is a square.
He would pose marvelously for a painting, and I think he’d probably make a fabulous back catcher for baseball. Let us hope he does not settle for the limitations normalcy declares his body to have. Normalcy is often a horrid liar.

And finally – the simplest and least extreme – the most exhilarating observation of them all. Sitting on the bus, a violin between my legs a back pack underneath my arm and an elitest book in my hands. I have no recollection of the person sitting beside me. I have no idea what he looks like apart from the fact that he wears jeans. And I was very grateful they weren’t the kind of jeans I’m used to seeing – they were baggy, not tight. He sat at first to the side but then turned, facing frontwards like me. And our elbows were grazing each other. And it was most interesting – for that moment – because I was very excited that I had touched this person’s elbow and would never ever see him again in that same context with that same understanding.
I considered the fact that he was a separate entity from myself, that he lived, and breathed – had done so forever and would continue being until the day he died – that I wouldn’t know the date of his death. But that I knew for that one small moment he was alive. And I was very happy to know that he had existed, and that I was so fortunate as to feel him live.

The great difference is that this man on the bus was a real human being. And everyone else had just been an image running across my brain, and reflected upon – if that. Musings
It is so rare these moments when you fully understand that a person, or groups of people are actually alive. That there is skin and air and then more skin. The space between the two is electric and alive and sensitive – not static, automatic or expected.