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# Returning to the Piano at 47
- URL: https://juniati.com/returning-to-the-piano-at-47/
- Published: 2026-08-12T14:09:02.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-14T13:10:17.000Z
- Author: Juniati
- Tags: Resonance

There is a funny distance between "being able to" and "daring to try again". I learned piano as an adult, and then life took over, work, marriage, children, and the piano became a beautiful but silent piece of furniture.

This year I decided to return. Not to become brilliant. Only to sit, place my hands on the keys, and allow myself to be a beginner again at forty-seven.

The first practice was embarrassing. Fingers that were once nimble are now stiff and forgetful. I hit wrong notes again and again. But something surprised me: those wrong notes did not make me stop. Quite the opposite, they reminded me that I was truly learning, not merely repeating something already mastered.

As a teacher, I often forget how frightening it is to sit in the student's chair. Returning to the piano put that memory back into my body: that learning always means being willing to look clumsy for a while. That progress often arrives only after we stop being ashamed of our own mistakes.

Now, every night before bed, I play for ten minutes. Sometimes only scales. Sometimes one short passage of a song I love, played slowly, with many pauses. The house falls quiet, the children are in their rooms, and those ten minutes become entirely my own.

I am not good yet. Perhaps I will never be as good as my fifteen-year-old daughter. But I have found something more valuable than skill: the quiet pleasure of doing something simply because it is beautiful.

*This week's practice note: slow the hard passage down to half tempo. Patience, it turns out, is the key once again.*

0:00 

/1:47 

1× 

"Right Here Waiting" has been with me for as long as I can remember. I finally sat down and let my hands find it again, slowly, one phrase at a time. I am not a perfect player, and you will hear a pause here and there. But there is something about this melody that asks you to slow down and mean every note. Recorded at home, after the house went quiet.