One of my goals is to make sure, even after you cancel your membership with Measure by Measure, that you're having a good experience at the piano and you're applying good principles.

I don't want to be the end-all be-all of your piano experience. That's way too much responsibility for me. I don't want that.

I do want to be a voice and a help and an encouragement to you in some way. One of the most common reasons people cancel their Measure by Measure membership is they're too busy, and

I totally get that. I've canceled things before because I'm too busy. I completely sympathize with that idea. First of all, I want to say that I know what you're busy with is important and I see that and I honor that and it probably means that you're stepping up in your responsibility with something. I hope everybody's okay, I hope you're healthy. I hope the people that you love are healthy. One of the big things that can happen is health goes sideways and you get overwhelmed, or your responsibility is greater than it used to be. And I see that and I honor that and I want to encourage you and just say okay - it's okay to be busy and I don't want to suggest that you need to quit something in order to make time for piano.

That's a separate discussion. Sometimes we need to have encouragement or permission to let go of things that are taking our time that we don't want to spend our time with, but that's a separate conversation. We'll put that somewhere else. Either way, I want to offer a couple of thoughts and principles here.

#1 Redefine Practice
Principle number one is, it's okay to redefine, practice to fit your lifestyle. Okay, no one gets to be the author of your practice except for you. No one gets to expect anything of your practice. Even the voice in your head that's telling you what things you think you should practice.

The things that you “should” do. That “should” word is often there in that voice. In our head, you get to decide when, where, how, how much and why you practice. That's your job and you get to do that and you get to redefine practice to fit into your lifestyle.

That might mean it looks different at different seasons in your life, so that's just principle. Number one - redefine practice a little bit. How could you redefine practice so that it fits into your current lifestyle? Your current responsibilities? Your current management of your energy?

Your Energy Flows Outward
The second principle I want to talk about is, and I stole this from Maria Bowler, “your energy flows outward”.

I could redefine it for this situation. I could say “your desires won't be ignored.” However, you decide to move forward. Okay, so here's what I mean: denying what we want can have negative repercussions that spill into the rest of our life. This is the warning part of it, it sounds like I'm warning you, like don't go away from piano because you'll be miserable haha.

That's not what I'm trying to say. But we can easily become kind of resentful when parts of us or parts of our values are denied because we're so busy with something else. The principal works in reverse too. So Giving a small space to our desires is often enough to have positive effects that expand into the rest of our lives.

So it works both ways, you can deny it, it will show up in negative ways, not in good ways. You can give it a small space and say, okay, I'm taking steps towards that, and it can have a positive effects on your energy, towards other aspects of your life, connecting that with the “redefined practice principle”, you could say, I give this once a week practice, I only practice on weekends, I allow myself 15 minutes a day to do this .... whatever works for you. You don't even have to spell out a minimum viable practice like that. You don't even have to say, I'm going to show up twice a week. You could say “I keep my phone on my piano”, something like that. Or you could just have some interesting way of making the piano available to you. So that you can show up spontaneously if you so desire and that can be an opening for that, it can be just like a way of acknowledging that you still have this desire and you can still do that.

And it's also not going to take away time or discipline or energy from your other bigger responsibilities right now.


Give Space - You Are More Than Your Responsibilities
Okay, the third and last thing I want to say is it can change your life to give space to your talents and desires in really unseen ways. I tell the story of my parents when they had their third kid, my little brother. He was premature, he was in the hospital for like a month, when he was born. I don't remember. I was like, five years old at the time, so I was kind of oblivious to it the whole time. Looking back. I know that it must have been an extremely stressful time for my parents and the way we've talked about it is like, oh yeah, that was such a huge experience for my parents.

And having kids of my own I go, oh I never could have like known that as a five-year-old kid, just kind of seeing that experience. I see that it could have easily become something that totally defined who they were had they let it. And looking back at my childhood my parents were really good at not letting this one part of life completely define who they are.

So it was soon after my little brother was born that my dad decided - oh I need a piano, I need a piano to just take my mind off of things a little bit, to have a stress relief, to have an outlet for himself, it was a creative thing that he wanted to do.

So he bought himself a piano and I'm extremely grateful that he did. I'm grateful that he did it while I was still young enough that I was super drawn to it. It had this added benefit of bringing music into our home, which was such a wonderful thing.

At that stressful time, I remember going to sleep at night, listening to my dad practice the piano. And I would get up and go and ask him about it. I remember, once going “what does piano mean?” And he said “it means very very quiet. Now go to bed”.

It was just this fun teaching opportunity. I was probably five or six at the time. I'm very grateful that that happened, the way it did, and that my dad gave space to that value in his life. And it made room for me to have space for that.

It gave me access to that piano. And I spent many, many hours and many, many years practicing that piano that he bought at that time. Now, had he delayed that, had he become overwhelmed and gotten super focused on “I gotta make more money, so I can pay for these medical bills and support my family, in this way, andI've got to make sure that we're getting all the doctor's appointments and stuff set up” and had had life become all about this kind of crisis, who knows? If it ever would have come back, who knows if we ever would have gotten a piano?

Who knows if he ever would have turned back to it. So I just wanted to put this out there, and use this example that's personal to me to encourage you to find a space for your desire to play piano, whether I get to be a part of that Journey or not, I totally understand. It's totally up to you. So, thanks for listening.
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