Piano

A long time ago, a family from our church moved out west. I don't remember where they moved or why they moved, but since they moved from new hampshire, any of the 48 states to the left are all "out west" to me.
They gave our family a spinet piano that has been in our dining room ever since.
I quit piano lessons when I was in 3rd grade, something that I regret now. But it has meant that I hardly ever touch the piano in the dining room.
Every now and then, when no one else is home, I noodle around on it. But that's the extent of my experience playing piano.

With that said, I have just experienced something that every person reading this needs to experience.

Find a piano sometime when no one is around. I suggest a big room. There are few things in the World of Man-Made-Things that I love more dearly than enormous empty rooms.
Play a single note up high.
For your sake right now, just imagine it.
Its just a note.
A single, solitary note that has almost no effect.
It has a brief life, but no matter how hard you play that high note, it quickly dies away.

But then you have to try using the sustain pedal.
When you hold down the sustain pedal, you unlock every string in the piano and allow them all to move freely. When you hold down the pedal and play the exact same note, you get something amazing and pretty unnerving.
Instead of just quickly dying out, that note causes every string to make noise. It literally effects everything around it. That same note now lasts almost forever. Even after the initial note has faded, the entire piano keeps talking and talking and talking. Its chilling to listen to.

I'm just a little bit obsessed with how I don't know the name of any of my great-great grandfathers. After 4 generations, I have no idea who those people were. But they set in motion a chain of events that caused me to be born, in the process causing God only knows how many other things to happen on this earth.

Usually in our heads, we think about our actions like a single note on a piano. We go about our lives as a string of isolated incidents. But the reality is that everything impacts everything.
Everything we do that comes in contact with the rest of Humanity reverberates like a note on a piano.
Our actions die out quickly. We live and die. But the results and consequences of even the little things last for a really, really long time.

Mending Wall

There is a Robert Frost poem that we read in highschool english class. "Mending Wall". I don't remember what year we read it, or what we discussed about it or the conclusions we came to about it. But I will always remember that we read it, and the proverbial line that "Good fences make good neighbors", that Frost may or may not have been telling us not to believe.

I'm not one to examine myself much. It's not something that I have ever left time in my day for me to do. I hate when people talk about "love languages" and Meyers-Briggs personality tests and junk like that because from what I can tell, if you're an adult, you should already know what makes you tick, what your personality is like, and whether you like hugs or getting gifts more. None of that is quantified, because by golly there is no human way to quantify your brain. So instead, we have to use subjective words to describe ourselves, which isn't really useful.
But one thing that I have noticed about me is that I really, really can't stand walls.

Walls are something that you jump over.
Walls are something that you knock over.
Walls are something that you can watch as they slowly fall apart over time.

We all spend our childhood within the confines of the walls that adults put around us.
Usually for our "protection" or "own benefit" but even if most kids can't see the "real" benefit of these walls, most if not all can see that they are just a wall.
Not even a real wall.
A metaphorical one.
Walls inside your head are easier to jump over than a wall made out of rocks.
So I did a lot of that when I was growing up.
And today, when people put a wall in front of me, my first reaction is to break it.
Every time.
It usually takes a great deal of effort for me to decide to let it be.
Maybe i'm just combative. I'd like to think of myself as never being content with status quo.

Yesterday morning, I watched Dean Kamen tell about 70 extraordinary highschool seniors to chase after their dreams and that if people who care about you try to hold you back, it probably means that you found something that needs to be done.

Easy words for an incredibly successful person to say to a bunch of kids who have never experienced failure. But hey. He's on to something.