The magical piano
A few minutes ago I was reading something which poked fun at one of the United States presidential candidates. I was smiling and in my heart of hearts I was agreeing. I do not find this person easy to love and yet… I am transported back to a texting conversation I was having last evening with a woman I know who has lived with the active addiction of her husband and the Asperger’s of her son. Her son is now living on his own in a nearby city. Her husband is not only active in a recovery program, he is active as a minister and was on the dean’s list this past semester at the college he is attending. Soon he will be ready to start working on his master’s degree and doing what he needs to do to get licensed as a professional counselor. His wife was also telling me that she and her husband have a pregnant woman who is also in early recovery from drug addiction living with them.
They have both taken all the tough experiences of the past and are using what they have learned to design and live their life in a way which is meaningful to them and helpful to others. Not everyone is able to do this, but an amazing number of people are able to take a very negative situation and turn it into a very positive one. One of the stories which I loved on a Ted Talk, to which I was listening earlier today, was about an experience of Keith Jarrett, the jazz musician. The Ted Talk is by Tim Harford and is entitled, “How messy problems can inspire creativity.” Mr. Jarrett was to play a jazz concert in Germany and when he checked out the venue and the piano prior to the concert, he discovered that the piano was not only out of tune but was missing the felt on some of the key hammers. The piano was clearly unplayable. It just hours prior to the concert. The teenager who had arranged this particular concert had no way to get the piano Mr. Jarrett needed prior to the concert. Mr. Jarrett was waiting in the car when he noticed this teenage girl standing in the rain looking crestfallen. He felt so bad for her that he determined that he would find a way to play the concert on this unplayable piano. Mr. Hartford then goes on to describe what happened when Mr. Jarrett sat down at this unplayable piano:
“Within moments it became clear that something magical was happening. Jarrett was avoiding those upper registers, he was sticking to the middle tones of the keyboard, which gave the piece a soothing, ambient quality. But also, because the piano was so quiet, he had to set up these rumbling, repetitive riffs in the bass. And he stood up twisting, pounding down on the keys, desperately trying to create enough volume to reach the people in the back row.
03:36
It's an electrifying performance. It somehow has this peaceful quality, and at the same time it's full of energy, it's dynamic. And the audience loved it. Audiences continue to love it because the recording of the Köln Concert is the best-selling piano album in history and the best-selling solo jazz album in history.”
Mr. Harford goes on to suggest that:
“That's a good way to solve a complicated problem. But you know what would make it a better way? A dash of mess. You add randomness, early on in the process, you make crazy moves, you try stupid things that shouldn't work, and that will tend to make the problem-solving work better. And the reason for that is the trouble with the step-by-step process, the marginal gains, is they can walk you gradually down a dead end. And if you start with the randomness, that becomes less likely, and your problem-solving becomes more robust.”
Another Ted Talk to which I listened while I was at the gym this morning had to do with the same issue of problem solving. This one was by a man who is both a police officer in one of the messiest cities crime wise and a minister. The title of his talk is “I love being a police officer, but we need reform.” He says:
“And so now, over the next 19 months, I shifted, and I transcended from being a drug sergeant -- ready to retire as a drug sergeant -- and went from level to level to level, until I find myself as a district commander, commander of the worst district in Baltimore city. We call it the Eastern District, the most violent district, the most impoverished district -- 46 percent unemployment in that district. National rating at that time, national rating, the AIDS and the tuberculosis [rating], was always on the top 10 list for zip codes for cities across the nation, or just zip codes across the nation. The top 10 -- I didn't say state, I didn't say city -- that little neighborhood…And so I decided to come to that intersection where I could meet all classes, all races, all creeds, all colors; where I would meet the businesses and the faith-based, and the meds and I would meet all the people that made up the communities that I had authority over…
So I met them and I began to listen. See, police have a problem. Off the top, we want to bring things into the community and come up with these extravagant strategies and deployments, but we never talk to the community about them. And we shove them into the community and say, "Take that." But we said we'd get rid of that stinkin' thinkin', so we talked to our communities. We said, "This is your community table. We'll pull up a chair. We want to hear from you. What's going to work in your community?" And then some great things started to happen.”
He also said:
“No way in the world that we should be calling the police because my neighbor's music is up too loud, because his dog came over to my yard and did a number two; there's no way we should be calling the police. But we have surrendered so much of our responsibility. Listen, when I was a little boy coming up in Baltimore -- and listen, we played rough in the street -- I ain't never see the police come and break us up. You know who came? It was the elders. It was the parental figures in the community. It was those guardians, it was that village mentality. They came and said, "Stop that!" and "Do this." and "Stop that." We had mentors throughout all of the community.”
If the reader is looking for something new in this blog or any of my blogs for that matter, then he/she is going to be disappointed. The reader may accurately intuit that I wrote about similar examples in such blogs as “The Impossible dream.” Indeed I did. In fact a lot of my blogs have the same central messages, none of which are original to me. The core of the messages are:
· Pay attention
· All problems/situations are relationship problems/situations.
· See problems or changes as opportunities.
· Love works. Us versus them does not work.
This is pretty simple. As did the musicians living in the death camps under Nazi Germany, Mr. Jarrett made do with what he had and played some amazing music. Mr. Russel, the minister and police officer, switched from ‘us versus them’ to “we” or “them is us and us is them.” The Socratic philosophers often suggested that the road to wisdom began with “knowing oneself.” Teachers such as Jesus talked about the speck in the eye of one’s neighbor reflecting the log in one’s own eye. Buddhists often suggest that we are all a mirror of each other even though costumes of culture, race, gender and religion might make us seem different.
Mr. Russell took what he “knew” as a minister and applied it to his other calling as a police officer in Baltimore. Ironically he went from being a drug sergeant to being that person who is struggling with the loneliness of living with addictive addiction to being part of the we of the 12-step recovery program. In the 12-step recovery program the “one addict helping another” philosophy has been the key to claiming or reclaiming one’s place as a valued, powerful, and important member of the community. The community has to let go of ‘they (meaning the police) have to make Johnny behave’ to ‘we need to show Johnny how to live.’ I am an elder. The members of the police force are elders. The grandmother next door is an elder. We are all elders and as a community of elders we can make a huge difference.
Just yesterday I was congratulating or acknowledging the fact that R has 15 years in recovery. I recall hearing him tell his story of being in the grip of his addiction in a hotel room all by himself in Chicago. It was a lonely, desperate place. For many years now he has been an elder both in the 12-step recovery community and the community as a whole inviting others to be a part of the solution – to be a part of the we.
Mr. Jarrett thought that the problem was that the piano was out of tune; a feltless piano. But, in fact, it was his relationship with it that was the problem. When he went from “that piano” to the we of the piano and himself amazing music was created
But what if my piano today is that political candidate who I see as broken? Can I accept the challenge to quit viewing him or her as the problem and accept that I have the power to see him or her as the other half of the “we?” I want to say, “Please, please give me another way of learning this lesson. This one is impossible but then I think of that broken, useless piano. Humm….
Written January 26, 2016
A few minutes ago I was reading something which poked fun at one of the United States presidential candidates. I was smiling and in my heart of hearts I was agreeing. I do not find this person easy to love and yet… I am transported back to a texting conversation I was having last evening with a woman I know who has lived with the active addiction of her husband and the Asperger’s of her son. Her son is now living on his own in a nearby city. Her husband is not only active in a recovery program, he is active as a minister and was on the dean’s list this past semester at the college he is attending. Soon he will be ready to start working on his master’s degree and doing what he needs to do to get licensed as a professional counselor. His wife was also telling me that she and her husband have a pregnant woman who is also in early recovery from drug addiction living with them.
They have both taken all the tough experiences of the past and are using what they have learned to design and live their life in a way which is meaningful to them and helpful to others. Not everyone is able to do this, but an amazing number of people are able to take a very negative situation and turn it into a very positive one. One of the stories which I loved on a Ted Talk, to which I was listening earlier today, was about an experience of Keith Jarrett, the jazz musician. The Ted Talk is by Tim Harford and is entitled, “How messy problems can inspire creativity.” Mr. Jarrett was to play a jazz concert in Germany and when he checked out the venue and the piano prior to the concert, he discovered that the piano was not only out of tune but was missing the felt on some of the key hammers. The piano was clearly unplayable. It just hours prior to the concert. The teenager who had arranged this particular concert had no way to get the piano Mr. Jarrett needed prior to the concert. Mr. Jarrett was waiting in the car when he noticed this teenage girl standing in the rain looking crestfallen. He felt so bad for her that he determined that he would find a way to play the concert on this unplayable piano. Mr. Hartford then goes on to describe what happened when Mr. Jarrett sat down at this unplayable piano:
“Within moments it became clear that something magical was happening. Jarrett was avoiding those upper registers, he was sticking to the middle tones of the keyboard, which gave the piece a soothing, ambient quality. But also, because the piano was so quiet, he had to set up these rumbling, repetitive riffs in the bass. And he stood up twisting, pounding down on the keys, desperately trying to create enough volume to reach the people in the back row.
03:36
It's an electrifying performance. It somehow has this peaceful quality, and at the same time it's full of energy, it's dynamic. And the audience loved it. Audiences continue to love it because the recording of the Köln Concert is the best-selling piano album in history and the best-selling solo jazz album in history.”
Mr. Harford goes on to suggest that:
“That's a good way to solve a complicated problem. But you know what would make it a better way? A dash of mess. You add randomness, early on in the process, you make crazy moves, you try stupid things that shouldn't work, and that will tend to make the problem-solving work better. And the reason for that is the trouble with the step-by-step process, the marginal gains, is they can walk you gradually down a dead end. And if you start with the randomness, that becomes less likely, and your problem-solving becomes more robust.”
Another Ted Talk to which I listened while I was at the gym this morning had to do with the same issue of problem solving. This one was by a man who is both a police officer in one of the messiest cities crime wise and a minister. The title of his talk is “I love being a police officer, but we need reform.” He says:
“And so now, over the next 19 months, I shifted, and I transcended from being a drug sergeant -- ready to retire as a drug sergeant -- and went from level to level to level, until I find myself as a district commander, commander of the worst district in Baltimore city. We call it the Eastern District, the most violent district, the most impoverished district -- 46 percent unemployment in that district. National rating at that time, national rating, the AIDS and the tuberculosis [rating], was always on the top 10 list for zip codes for cities across the nation, or just zip codes across the nation. The top 10 -- I didn't say state, I didn't say city -- that little neighborhood…And so I decided to come to that intersection where I could meet all classes, all races, all creeds, all colors; where I would meet the businesses and the faith-based, and the meds and I would meet all the people that made up the communities that I had authority over…
So I met them and I began to listen. See, police have a problem. Off the top, we want to bring things into the community and come up with these extravagant strategies and deployments, but we never talk to the community about them. And we shove them into the community and say, "Take that." But we said we'd get rid of that stinkin' thinkin', so we talked to our communities. We said, "This is your community table. We'll pull up a chair. We want to hear from you. What's going to work in your community?" And then some great things started to happen.”
He also said:
“No way in the world that we should be calling the police because my neighbor's music is up too loud, because his dog came over to my yard and did a number two; there's no way we should be calling the police. But we have surrendered so much of our responsibility. Listen, when I was a little boy coming up in Baltimore -- and listen, we played rough in the street -- I ain't never see the police come and break us up. You know who came? It was the elders. It was the parental figures in the community. It was those guardians, it was that village mentality. They came and said, "Stop that!" and "Do this." and "Stop that." We had mentors throughout all of the community.”
If the reader is looking for something new in this blog or any of my blogs for that matter, then he/she is going to be disappointed. The reader may accurately intuit that I wrote about similar examples in such blogs as “The Impossible dream.” Indeed I did. In fact a lot of my blogs have the same central messages, none of which are original to me. The core of the messages are:
· Pay attention
· All problems/situations are relationship problems/situations.
· See problems or changes as opportunities.
· Love works. Us versus them does not work.
This is pretty simple. As did the musicians living in the death camps under Nazi Germany, Mr. Jarrett made do with what he had and played some amazing music. Mr. Russel, the minister and police officer, switched from ‘us versus them’ to “we” or “them is us and us is them.” The Socratic philosophers often suggested that the road to wisdom began with “knowing oneself.” Teachers such as Jesus talked about the speck in the eye of one’s neighbor reflecting the log in one’s own eye. Buddhists often suggest that we are all a mirror of each other even though costumes of culture, race, gender and religion might make us seem different.
Mr. Russell took what he “knew” as a minister and applied it to his other calling as a police officer in Baltimore. Ironically he went from being a drug sergeant to being that person who is struggling with the loneliness of living with addictive addiction to being part of the we of the 12-step recovery program. In the 12-step recovery program the “one addict helping another” philosophy has been the key to claiming or reclaiming one’s place as a valued, powerful, and important member of the community. The community has to let go of ‘they (meaning the police) have to make Johnny behave’ to ‘we need to show Johnny how to live.’ I am an elder. The members of the police force are elders. The grandmother next door is an elder. We are all elders and as a community of elders we can make a huge difference.
Just yesterday I was congratulating or acknowledging the fact that R has 15 years in recovery. I recall hearing him tell his story of being in the grip of his addiction in a hotel room all by himself in Chicago. It was a lonely, desperate place. For many years now he has been an elder both in the 12-step recovery community and the community as a whole inviting others to be a part of the solution – to be a part of the we.
Mr. Jarrett thought that the problem was that the piano was out of tune; a feltless piano. But, in fact, it was his relationship with it that was the problem. When he went from “that piano” to the we of the piano and himself amazing music was created
But what if my piano today is that political candidate who I see as broken? Can I accept the challenge to quit viewing him or her as the problem and accept that I have the power to see him or her as the other half of the “we?” I want to say, “Please, please give me another way of learning this lesson. This one is impossible but then I think of that broken, useless piano. Humm….
Written January 26, 2016
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