Sabbath Devotional :: Keep Trying

keep trying - Mormon Women for Ethical Government — .

In my piano studio, the spring months are spent preparing for our annual recital. I work with each student to learn and polish pieces to perform in a formal setting. We carefully lay the foundation for success by first getting the correct fingers on the correct notes, then adding rhythm, dynamics, and articulations as they are ready. At every stage in the learning process, we pay close attention to melody and musicality. Of course it is crucial that the students are prepared to play the right notes; but it is just as important to perform those notes in an expressive way.

As we approach recital time, we make plans for how the students might handle their nerves in an intense performance environment. We talk about how to recover from errors. I host group lessons where we create a performance atmosphere as they play for each other. I discuss the word “adrenaline” with the older students and how to identify what is a good amount. But the most important thing I say goes something like this: “You are not a robot. You will make mistakes. When you make that first mistake, tell yourself, ‘There it is,” and keep playing, doing what you already know how to do, always focusing on the beauty of the music.”

When performance day arrives, I sit on the front row — and I enjoy myself! Even the youngest pianists can make real music. Not just hammers pounding on strings, but beautiful melodies, lovingly shaped into meaningful phrases. There are stumbles that happen here and there, but the students largely perform as we practiced, with precision, grace, and enthusiasm.

But every year, there are one or two who get into real trouble during their performance. They have a memory lapse or a finger slip that derails them for a period of time, and they wander around the keys, trying to find their place. I sit on the edge of my seat, ready with the printed music if needed. But they always work through it, they recover, they go on, and they finish it! I find myself feeling particularly attached to those performances, to those students who slip and then recover. At our first post-performance lesson, I help them celebrate their courage to carry on. If we do a positive and thorough analysis of what went wrong, they go into the next performance from a place of greater strength. If we ignore what happened or if they beat themselves up over the mistakes, they run the risk of falling into a rut and doing it again the next time.

I was reflecting on one student’s particularly difficult performance this past spring and was suddenly overwhelmed with spiritual parallels. As a classical pianist, I have spent many years in pursuit of perfection. As a Christian, I have taken the Lord’s charge to “be ye therefore perfect” very seriously. In both, I fall short over and over again. But I have learned that the key to a good performance is a practiced ability to recover and keep going, just as I have chosen to focus on developing a daily practice of repentance.

I love these words in Sister Eubank’s 2017 General Conference address, where she talks about a friend who turned her life around: “She is righteous; she has a wide-open heart for others who have made mistakes and want to change. And just like all of us, she isn’t perfect, but she knows how to repent and to keep trying.”

Perfection in this life is out of our reach, but righteousness is always within our grasp. Focusing on getting things “exactly right” will often block our way to being the type of radiantly righteous women who easily open our hearts to those around us and thereby influence them for good. If I prepare my students well, they will not be hyper-focused on the notes as they perform. They will be caught up in the luminous melodies in the music, and the audience will leave with a sense of wonder at the joy in their playing.

That is how I want to live my life, with the sort of radiant righteousness Sister Eubank describes above! Of course I want to make good choices, but I don’t want to keep a running list of my inevitable “wrong notes” in my head. I want to repent and keep trying, believing that the Atonement of Christ is real. As Elder Renlund has taught, “…God cares a lot more about who we are and who we are becoming than about who we once were. He cares that we keep on trying.”