My parents have a big, beautiful garden where they grow every vegetable and fruit that grows in Germany. We also have apple trees that bear the most delicious, sweet, juicy apples you will ever taste. Every autumn the apples are ready for harvest, and when I look at our apple-trees during that time, I am struck by the sheer abundance that is almost a wasteful amount of apples. Apples on the ground, apples hanging from the branches, apples everywhere. But soon these trees will be bare, entering their dormant stage. They will enter a season of waiting in which they do not bear any fruit. At least they are not bearing any visible fruit, and the waiting for more apples looks barren when it is actually the preparation for abundance.
Even the Bible talks about bearing fruit in season. “There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven.” ~ Ecclesiastes 1:3
In years long gone by, the only way to do things was in rhythm with nature, observing and respecting its laws. We could only eat fresh berries and tomatoes in the summer, apples in the autumn, canned and stored foods in the winter, and the little snowdrop flowers were the first messengers that spring is arriving.
Little Snowdrop flower
Now we live in a culture, where fruits and everything else we can think of are available all the time. We don’t have to observe the natural rhythm of sowing and harvest, of night and day, of rest and work. We can produce everything artificially and instantly. And that is where trouble begins: we ignore our own physical limitations, and the limitations of each season of our life. We demand and we expect “fresh fruit” at the snap of our fingers.
But learning to play the piano brings us back to those natural rhythms of life itself; it is a cycle of sowing, which is the daily practicing, then waiting, which is more practicing, then harvesting fruits, which is the playing in recitals or just having mastered a concept or a piece, and then the barren waiting again.
Music Transforms You 