It’s never too late to follow your dreams.
I once told a friend of ours, a classical music conductor here in Vienna, that before I die, I’d love to be able to professionally sing a song and accompany myself simultaneously on the piano. He laughed and exclaimed, Before you die! Why don’t you do it right now? That was over ten years ago. I never tried.
It’s been forty-three years since I stopped playing piano and took up drumming. In June of 1969 I got the highest mark in Vancouver at grade one level piano with the Toronto Royal Conservatory, and at age fourteen completed eight of ten grades after just 3 1/2 years of some (almost) daily practice. I remember later, as a wayward teenager, sitting in my mom’s living room with the headphones on listening to Stevie Wonder pour out his magic, thinking — and feeling — how wonderful it would be to do that. Sometimes I would cry when the feeling became too real. I never completely lost that feeling, but it ended up getting buried deep down.
Often we have to just keep plodding along until our inner skies clear, and the sun finally comes out.
I could never have imagined that someday far away, when I was getting very close to oldness, I would finally have enough spontaneity and self-respect to simply open a piano and play around with it, at the same time opening my heart through my voice. The weight of old patterns in us may be an illusion, waiting for a fresh breeze to come around and disperse it. I guess we really can reach that legendary state of Second Childhood.
Never wait too long to amble forward and peek around that next bend. Something delicious your soul’s been thirsting for might be shining there, out where the buffalo roam!
Self-Help 