Failure and success

Sometimes I am just amazed at how close the distance between failure and success is. As a pianist, a C chord is millimeters away from a B chord. Drop your hand a quarter inch to the left and there's dissonance and a cringing panic in the chest as you try to adjust.

You've played this piece a hundred times, probably more, at various tempos, in so many different ways, taking apart the voicing and the nuances, studying in such detail the way your piano part fits with the voice parts, and still, when you put it all together, there is a surprise. "How fascinating!" one of my mentors advises me to think when the unthinkable occurs in performances. "OMG!" or "what the F#ck" is what really goes through my head when the unexpected happens.

Yes, those of us who know the piece in such great detail know exactly where we have fallen short, while those listening may only hear a momentary pause, a slight hesitation, or a moment of awkwardness. Sometimes the failure is barely noticeable, sometimes not.

But we who perform know.

And we care outrageously.

It's a good thing, in that the knowing and the caring spurs us on to greater practice, greater precision, greater efforts that eventually produce greater results.

But at the moment of failure, and the remembrance of it, even with many many many successes on its heels, it still feels like *shit*. We go home, we cry, we kick ourselves, we replay the failure many times more than we replay the success.

And we ask ourselves [again, and again, and again], am I going to give up or am I going to go on?

And we take a nap, and then we go on.