It is always good to master essentials before going on to higher levels. If you move on to higher levels without mastering essentials, your work and creations will be randomly mosaic: here a flash of brilliance, there some solid workmanship, but the whole hampered by a lack of basics, causing a weakening, leading to a loss of credibility, a non-reliance in your product, your output.

 

Essentials are basics are key

 

We lose no time in reinforcing the basics, as much as we may think we are beyond them. But this is precisely how we advance, in music as in life, by consciously practicing the most basic exercises, by drastically reducing tempo, by lovingly examining the minutiae.

 

 

It is not the quantity of the practice you indulge in but the quality of attention that you bring to it. When you slow the music down extremely, when you are paying attention to every note, only then do you notice how uneven in texture and length all the notes are. But once having been made aware of this anomaly, you correct it easily. It is just a matter of knowing where the anomaly is.

 

And all it took for you to see the anomaly was exaggerated attention to detail.

 

 

Can you see how this might apply to all of life, let us say your work, your creations, what you love and want to see prosper?  This is all of your life.

 

 

Can you see how exaggerated attention to detail might also make you more accomplished, effective, deft, sure, and pleasing in every way?

 

What might this heightened attention to detail look like?

 

Become present in every moment. This is exactly what it would feel like if you came from outer space, newly arrived with no previous beliefs or scripts.  Of course, the very first thing you would do would be to observe.

 

Observe silence

 

As much as you can, as often as you can, and more than you are now.

 

 

 

You may feel comfortable where you are now. You may have achieved a balance between what you will and will not acknowledge, making unconscious all the thoughts that make you afraid.

Unconscious, afraid, who needs either?

Remind yourself you just arrived here yesterday and are trying to learn all you can. You observe.

 

 

At the same time, you have a mantra, an inner lode star, something you live by, a sine qua non, without which nothing, a compass that always guides you. Otherwise, it would be too easy to lose your way; there are many distractions.

 

Let me have no other desire than to do good