arscol

Remember being a kid. That sense of discovery tinged with a little fear. Imagine stumbling through woods and finding an abandoned cabin.

Pushing the door open, you see an old piano. You’d heard one of those on a recording, but this was real. You knew the magic it holded. But your fingers were strangers to those yellowed keys.

Yet, you came back. Day after day. You’d sit on the bench, the silence of the cabin pressing in, and just hit the keys. Thumping noises and awkward, disjointed sounds. Frustration shouting into a void.

But you kept returning. Maybe it was the quiet, maybe the weirdness of it. Your hands moved, searching blindly.

Then, one afternoon, it happened without thought. Not a single note, but three. Your hand, almost of its own accord, pressed down – thump – but this time… it wasn’t noise. It was a sound. A deep, resonant chord that hung in the air of the old cabin, richer and fuller than anything you’d made before. It vibrated in your chest.

You froze. You lifted your hand, hesitant, then pressed those same three keys again. There. It bloomed again. Solid. Intentional. Right.

Something shifted. Not in the piano, but in you. The next notes felt like choices. Patterns emerging from chaos, faint trails you could follow. The overwhelming confusion, the not-knowing. You hadn’t mastered it, not even close. But you found a foothold.

Life feels like that. We are drawn by possibility. Making meaningless noises, we keep showing up, pressing keys we don’t understand.

And then, one day, you find it. We strike a chord, the first real sound. The confirmation that confusion wasn’t pointless, it was the path.

Now you’re starting to play.