Find a Star

Recently a friend and I were talking about the state of the world. “It’s hard to know what to think,” Jeff said. “There’s a lot of noise out there.”

That’s just it, isn’t it? There’s a lot of noise out there.

At this point, we should know better than to listen to the noise. But it’s so, well, noisy. Loud. In our faces. It is hard to think.

“It’s time to get off our phones and start picking up trash,” another friend said to me last week. I don’t think that’s just a metaphor. I think we need to start picking up trash. Quite literally.

Like everyone, I am concerned about what this next week will bring. There’s a lot of noise out there. Everybody seems fragile, raw, on the edge of breaking. I have been reading the book “Time’s Echo” by the music critic Jeremy Eichler. It is about the period between WWI and WWII through the lens of a few Germanic composers and their musical response to what was happening in their country. In short, it is about how broken and how noble, how wrong and how right we human beings can be. All at the same time. In case you were wondering, these are not unprecedented times we are living in, friends.

Last week our “Making Lying Wrong Again” sign was stolen. I had been out hiking that morning and came home to discover it was gone. I wasn’t particularly surprised. In fact, I was rather surprised that the sign had lasted as long as it did. The next day, I was teaching when my neighbor showed up at my front door holding our sign. “I thought it had been stolen!” I said when I saw him.

“It was stolen,” he replied and proceeded to tell me an unbelievable tale. According to my neighbor, the previous morning his wife saw a couple of guys walk by and take the sign. She didn’t want to confront them, so let it go. A few hours later, she saw another guy walk past in the opposite direction carrying the sign. A few hours later, another person walked by the other way with the sign. We later learned that somehow the sign kept landing on the doorsteps of neighbors up and down the street who would then try to return it to the right house. “It belongs down in the other block,” one person apparently said, “you know, where that piano teacher is.”

“Clearly, we all want you to have this sign back in your yard,” my neighbor said handing it to me. It was almost—almost!—enough to give me hope again.

I am reminded of something a friend told me about attending a yoga class on the evening of 9/11. The teacher approached the class as if nothing had happened that day, just led the group through one pose after another. At the time, my friend was bothered by this seemingly indifference to the tragedy of that morning. But later as she thought about it, she realized that maybe this response was intentional and thoughtful, that as people of practice maybe it is our job to show up and keep practicing. We return to the yoga mat, the piano bench, the meditation cushion. The world will always pivot and spin and shift around us; we keep practicing.

I have been thinking about this a lot as I brace myself for Tuesday. “So when at times the mob is swayed/To carry praise or blame too far,” goes a favorite Robert Frost poem. “We may choose something like a star/To stay our minds on and be staid.”

It might, I think, be a good idea to get some stars in order. Regardless of what happens this week, there will be leaves to rake and trash to pick up, wood to chop and floors to sweep. Maybe we should plan to plant pansies. Get vaccinated. Teach a kid to read, or at the very least, to tie their shoes. Learn to say “hello” in three other languages, or memorize a beloved poem. Eat extra vegetables and do five sun salutations. Swim laps and go for a walk. Turn off our phones. There will be so much noise. So. Much. Noise. Maybe it is our sacred and holy work to seek out some silence somewhere and breathe.

On Friday morning I played the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations at a dear friend’s funeral. Claudia was a professional musician with a deep love of Bach. Some years ago, when I was preparing to do a set of concerts of the Goldbergs, Claudia was someone I turned to when I needed a set of good ears.

The Goldberg Variations are a keyboardist's Mount Everest. They consist of thirty variations, a tightly constructed Sudoku puzzle of musical and technical tricks. Bach, ever the teacher, can’t seem to help himself, stuffing in one pedagogical exercise or mind-twisting riddle after another. And then, after all the acrobats and antics, the puzzles and puns, the aria comes back. We are back to where we began. There is no climax, no emotional pinnacle to this piece. It simply begins again. It is as if Bach is gently telling us that it is our job to keep showing up, to practice, to begin again. And again. And again.

Friends, there always will be trash to pick up. Find a star.