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Just Like Starting Over


This morning I returned to Schubert for the first time in a couple of weeks.

You read that right. It's been about two weeks (maybe more?) since I last practiced Schubert.

There is something wrong with your life and your priorities when you don't have 30 minutes a day to spare for piano practice or voice practice. And there is definitely something wrong.

Not only have I not had time for piano, I haven't had time for writing, exercise, meditation/prayer, reading, listening to music, blogging, or even housework. It seems I go from work (where I'm always behind) to toting Anne places (where I'm always in a rush, and always late).

Take, for instance, right now. I'm sitting down at 7:40 (work doesn't start until 8:30). My calendar has my first three hours blocked off for non-priority stuff that I need to get out of the way before I start on the priority stuff. But I just checked the ticket queue, and guess what. I have a good hour's worth of client communications to do. Know what that means? Do it now or wait until work hours--which means bumping the priority project back another hour.

I can't get ahead. In fact, I'm not even keeping up. I feel like I'm falling a little (or a lot) more behind every single day.

But, as I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, I did manage to re-visit Schubert for a few minutes this morning. It was 6:30 a.m. and my sleeping family probably didn't appreciate it, but it's the only time I'll have today. The rest of the day is work, then church, then choir, and I won't be back till almost 9 p.m.

I stumbled through pages of what I'd already learned. I hadn't played the new material enough to build muscle memory, so it felt a little bit like relearning. The closer I got to the end, the better I sounded. The final page didn't sound bad at all. But those earlier sections? Just like starting over. So I will have some work to do to get all of that back. Hopefully it will come easy once I've worked on it a bit. And then I can move on to learning the rest of the piece.

Scales sounded good, though. As did arpeggios. So that's good.

Still, I feel angry and depressed this morning. I never have a moment for myself unless, like this morning, I wake up after five hours of sleep to grab 15 or 20 minutes at the piano. I guess I should be grateful that I have a piano. I just wish I had more time for it.

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