The Desert of Arizona
Sunny 67 Degrees
I still remember one of the first times I ever sat down at the pipe organ to practice. I was in a small Lutheran church in Akron PA.
If you’ve never tried it, playing the pipe organ is a bit like learning how to rub your head, pat your belly, sing a song out loud and jump up and down all at the same time. Oh, and if you’re playing during a church service, you might have someone talking to you at the same time.
It takes a little bit of work to get everything moving in the right direction. So basically, at the beginning, you are really, REALLY bad… for quite some time.
But slowly, ever so slowly, your brain begins to figure it out. First, you figure out how to actually hit the right pedals with your feet. Left, left, right, left, and so on. Then, by some miracle I haven’t yet explained, you develop the ability for your hands to do one thing while your feet are doing something else.
And so it goes… for years.
This is the path to mastery. The funny thing is that it doesn’t feel a whole lot different on day one than it does on some day 15 years into the future. You still just get up and do what you do. You’re always at YOUR leading edge, which means you never “arrive.”
Walk long enough on the road to mastery and people will start calling you an expert, maybe even a genius. But it probably won’t feel any different to you. Because you’ll still be on the border between what you can do and what you can’t do.
This is where Masters live… on that very line. There’s nowhere else to be really. Every day can feel like the first day, even though you might be far down the road from where you started.
The question isn’t, “Are you cut out to do this?” Of course you are. Anyone can hop on the road and start walking. The real question is, “Do you want to do this?”
Do you want to wake up and always be working towards the next level?
If you don’t make a conscious decision to be OK with never “getting there,” it might drive you nuts. The world drills into your brain that there is in fact somewhere to get. But it’s a big lie. A lie to keep you needy and easy to control.
But if you develop the ability to accept this fact that there’s nowhere to go, you’ll find yourself forgetting about that big goal you were trying to reach. Or those dreams that have you living in the future and completely missing out on the actual life that’s happening right in front of your face.
When you rediscover your ability to be present, you’ll look up each day at the world around you and be grateful for the time you get to enjoy the beauty.