Day 40: Using what I learned

We interrupt our regular broadcast to bring you this special update: the Dear beautiful Brown loom is now snug here in her new home, and she brought a baby sister: a lovely Parkinson floor inkle loom. More details soon, but for now a big thank you to everyone for all the loving energy sent toward this loom adoption.

Yesterday I mentioned that Andy and I are learning some new communication skills. I had a neat experience using the empathy thing to begin solving a different flavor of problem and want to tell you about it.

We’ve got a piano. We don’t play it, so you’d think the logical course of action would be to consider letting it go. It’s complicated, though (isn’t it always?). Among other things, the piano was our first big joint purchase as a couple.

When I was buying a house, a piano was one of the first things I thought about getting, and I took Andy with me to see this one I found, expecting him to talk me out of it. To my surprise, he was all, Let’s get it! What? Um, okay. The lovely antique upright, with the tuning marks inside from 1931 and formerly owned by a church, came to live in our house. Hooray.

I was talking with the brilliant Jen Hoffman recently, and I asked her for some little thought that could help me shift our thinking around the piano. She asked, If the piano was gone, what would there be room for in the relationship? Definitely a perspective I hadn’t considered before.

I posed the question to Andy and then sat with that idea for a day and a half but didn’t really feel any strong answers bubbling up. It doesn’t feel like some immovable block between us, because I think we’re both pretty caught up with our own individual baggage about why we bought it and what we expected would happen when we did.

Because I’m thinking about this whole self-empathy thing anyhow, I tweaked the question to ask, What space does the piano hold in my heart? What space does the piano hold in Andy’s heart? And then ideas started popping.

I thought about why I wanted the piano in the first place. I’ve had a lifelong dream of learning to play the piano. I took a semester of piano in college, and I spent more time outside class doing piano practice than I spent on homework for any other class in my entire college career. I was an Econ major, people, if that gives you any sense of how much I wanted to play piano.

After college I even fantasized about renting space at The Curtis Institute so I could practice. I couldn’t see getting a piano into my 5th floor apartment with the dinky elevator and the tight staircase, nor was I expecting to stay there forever, making piano moving inevitable. Don’t talk to me about keyboards. I had no interest in a keyboard. Pi-a-no.

Well, I am planning to stay in our house that we have now forever. So we got the piano, and I signed up for lessons. I found a woman who is no doubt a very talented pianist, but not such a great teacher, at least for an adult who is just trying to have fun. After getting yelled at one too many times, I bagged the lessons, and the piano has since sat neglected. Once in a while Andy will fudge his way through Pachelbel’s Canon in D or I’ll plonk out Little Birch Canoe, but mostly I use the piano to keep things out of reach of the cat.

So I refined the question further: When I was a kid, what need did I think taking piano lessons was going to fill? And I remembered how the dream formed.

My childhood friend Debbie had a piano at her house and took lessons. She sometimes couldn’t spend time with me because she had to practice. By contrast, my childhood was one of almost unlimited freedom to do whatever I wanted and not much in the way of forced enrichment. Sounds great, but when I think back on certain aspects of my childhood, I sometimes wonder, was anyone paying attention?

I think I looked at Debbie and thought, on some deep unconscious level, wow, I want to be cared about in that way. I want someone to know what is going on with me enough that they give me limits (no, you can’t play, you have to practice), help me stretch myself to learn something new, even when learning it felt like work.

And it’s the same thing I’m craving in my life now, that kind of support and encouragement to help me achieve my full potential or at least give it a good try. I’d love it if there was someone who was paying enough attention to what is going on with me to say hey, Darc, you can’t play, you have to practice.

I have this dream of doing something new and unfamiliar, of stretching myself, even if I’m not sure exactly how yet. I know I’m going to have to give the bulk of that support and encouragement to myself, but sheesh, if all that energy is tied up with it, no wonder I’m still holding on to the piano.