Happy New Year!

Hey! We made it! We are, after all, in 2018. And congratulations!

Like every beginning, we need to think of what we will put in that New Year. How, if you will, we shall fill up the vase. Those decisions need careful thinking and consideration.

Of course, every one wants to get a more beautiful self. Hence the gym membership that needs to happen within the first few days of the year. The idea being that when the summer rolls by, we will prance around in a very trim, very fit, very muscular body. Humpf! Lift those weights! Pace that treadmill!

But, we also have all sorts of other resolutions for our quest of a better life.

Quit smoking.

Quit drinking.

Quit procrastinating.

Quit Facebook.

Quit cursing.

Quit sugar.

Quit fat meals.

Now, that’s a lot of quitting. But, as a French chemist said: “Nature hates voids”. Meaning that every time you remove something, it has to be replaced with something else. And if you quit something that you used to do regularly in your life and you think was bad for you, you need to replace with something else. And, if possible, something beautiful.

That’s where piano comes in. Why? Because  we all want to be a better self, but we rarely ask the question of what beauty is. We associate beauty with fun, or pleasure, or awe. And it could be all of that. But beauty is first and foremost what one considers to be beautiful. It means that you need to develop a taste for beauty in order to understand your inner beauty. And, as always, developing something means a bit of research. We absolutely need to know a little bit about who we are before we get to chose what we want to become. No two ways around it!

Piano can help. You play the piano! Oh, it’s gorgeous! You’ve come to the piano because it is beautiful! Just listening to it. Just the sound!Listen to all this beauty! Your soul soars in the motion of music. Piano becomes a mode of transportation, you travel through vast areas of beauty! So, you start playing. You go take lessons (I know an excellent teacher in the Mayfair park area), and, as you progress, you get rewarded with the knowledge of preferring Beethoven over Handel, for example, or Duke Ellington over Billy Joel. As your fingers move on the keyboard, you understand a bit better what you are about. And isn’t that the ultimate reward?

People of the world! The gym is great. It is a great New Year’s resolution. But don’t forget the mind! We all need to shape up in that department. Go study music. Be it drums or piano, the rewards will be phenomenal.

Happy New Year, everybody! Happy 2018!