Professionals

They never started out as the way we see them now. They started with the first lesson. And before that, they didn’t know nuts. But, they persevered in what they did, and hence became professionals. And that is the thing that I sand in awe of professionals, their determination.

The thing is, no one started out as professionals. I’ve just started my jazz sessions and I know I will be playing as well as those lounge musicians or even like Hugh Grant when he played the song ‘way back into love’ which you can hear in the background. However, having just started my lessons I’m seriously noob now. I used to think that an ABRSM grade 8 was superb, but I’m taking those sentiments back. There are about 15 different chords per key, not counting inversions, and I used to only know 4. I thought mastering waltzes by Chopin and Preludes and Fuges by Mozart were great accomplishments, but I now realize that the real challenge is in figuring out the accompliment of a melody or a song in just seconds.

From spending hours of trying to come up and link the correct chords in a piece to being able to play like my teacher (who is by the way an accomplished and professional lounge pianist) is a journey with a distance longer than that of earth to the moon, or even the sun for that matter. Nevertheless I’m thoroughly convinced that through sheer determination, I’ll be professional one day too.

This is such a simple logic, but to have personally realized it is life changing.

Guess I’m just writing this to motivate myself to continue working at it even during times when I feel like tearing up my manuscript book up.

To conclude, below is a story of three professionals. Three Zen masters to be specific. Personally, I feel that it’s so stupid, so stupid that I can’t believe it took someone to actually come up with it. I simply can’t come to terms with the concept it’s trying to convey to its audience. Anyway, here it goes, the story of the three Zen masters, retold by sasha.

There once were 3 Zen masters. They were walking past a temple when they saw a lit candle. The youngest Zen master commented, ‘look, the flame is moving.’ In response, the 2nd most senior master replied, ‘no, it’s the wind that is moving.’ To the surprise of the 2nd master, who was very much please by his higher order thinking, the most senior of them meditated on their words for a moment, then said, ‘actually, it's the mind, that is moving.’