Returning to the Piano at 47

There is a funny distance between "being able to" and "daring to try again". I learned piano as a child, and then life took over—university, 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 twelve-year-old self. 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.