Thoughts on Things: The Tune the Bones Play

We are who our bones tell us to be. We dance to the tune they play. It takes years, sometimes, for us to hear the tune, so drowned out is it by the ambient noise of our families, schools, friends. The well-meaning people around us often seem determined to keep us from hearing that tune. They don't want us to dance to a tune that they didn't dictate.

 

So we muddle through for most of our lives, trying to dance to those loud tunes that come from others, because we simply can't hear the tune that our own bones play.

 

Until one day we do hear it, and suddenly everything makes sense. It's like a combination lock when you dial the right numbers and all the notches line up. Finally everything is aligned.

 

I wrote once about improvising on the piano—and how I've never been able to do it.  Writing it out let me see what my mind has been doing to me all my life. One compartment of my mind holds the term "improvise" and associates it exclusively with the piano. I play the piano. I am unable to improvise on the piano as I want to. Therefore, I cannot improvise.

 

That's one compartment.

 

In another compartment, however, is the knowledge that my strong suit is "making do." With no trouble I can prepare a three-course meal from the contents of my refrigerator. In fact, I used to imagine starting a personal-catering business in which I would create meals from the contents of my clients' refrigerators. I gave up this little dreamlet when I realized that most refrigerators contain a dried-up slice of commercial pizza, two cans of tonic water, one egg past its best-by date, and 17 jars of various store-bought salad dressings, each holding two tablespoons.

 

But the idea is still valid: I truly can make a meal from nothing.

 

When I sew, I don't mind making mistakes (which is a good thing, because I'm increasingly inattentive when I sew). Making what seems to be an irrevocable mistake simply means I have to find a creative way out of the mess. How can I cover it up? Disguise it? Make lemonade from it?

 

If you show me a blank room and ask me to decorate it, I'll not have any ideas at all. But show me a room with two or three mismatched items, one wall painted kelly green, and a pair of curtains that have seen better days, and then ask me to decorate it. I'm a whiz. I'm a whiz at making do. I'll recover this chair, make cushions from an old carpet, create patchwork curtains of lace and tatters, turn the kelly green wall into a meadow-mural.

 

So as I pondered these ramifications of my compartmentalized brain, I finally made the connection that I'm sure you made paragraphs ago: it's all a question of semantics! Joining, as I always have, the terms "improvise" and "piano," I had forgotten to look at the big picture.

 

My whole life is an improvisation! Everything I do involves improvising. If it doesn't intrinsically require improvising, then I throw in some improv any which way, because without improvisation I am bored stiff. I've got to play with things, in any area of my life, or I lose interest.

 

Looking back over my life, I can see how true this is. And yet, constrained by my narrow definition of "improvising," I was never able to acknowledge my gifts.

 

So who cares if I can't improvise at the piano? Not I. In a life as improvisational as mine, I obviously need one area where I just follow the written script. It gives me the grounding I need to counterbalance the trapeze act that is the rest of my life.

 

Improvisation is the tune my bones play.

 

Copyright 2007  Ann Tudor
www.anntudor.ca