Peter and I were discussing his piece for our upcoming performance class.

“…Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes…”

–Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Truth be told, I’ve been a bit stuck lately.

In Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert writes of a time when she and her Brazilian fiancé Felipe were traveling in Vietnam.

Thursday Charlie came dragging into his lesson.

It should be ordinary time.

So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark

and still the scales balance.

-Jane Hirshfield

Once, some years ago, this happened:

Some fun facts about pandemic piano lessons in the Ten Thousand Stars Studio:

It is the time of year where even the most free-spirited and unstructured among us succumb to the magnetic pull of seasonal routines and rituals.

Last month in performance classes, I introduced avant-garde musician John Cage as our new Name That Tune composer.

In the last few months, the country has been experiencing a fourth COVID surge.

Once when I was going through a particular rough period I got through it by asking myself over and over again the simple question: “Amy, right now are you okay?”

Last December, I had a routine cleaning at the dentist.

I have to admit I had almost forgotten about this one.

I had heard this at least a hundred times before.

Sitting at the piano yesterday during a choir rehearsal I was reminded of an incident that happened years ago.

Perhaps all the fiddling has finally gotten to me.

I call them “fiddlers.”

Maybe good practicing—and good teaching, for that matter —is just simple math: addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, over and over again in ten thousand combinations.