I have always wanted to learn to play the piano. Ever since I was a little girl, I was amazed by my friends who play.
The piano is such a fabulous musical instrument, and our minds and auras can be improved by learning the piano.
Driven by the desire to learn piano, I talked to Mr. Samuel, the music minister at our church, who agreed to teach me. Samuel is an amazingly talented musician who is from Taiwan.
Because of our culture and language, Samuel and I always talk about a lot of different things: food, cultural differences and of course music.
Born into a musician’s family, Samuel started his music career when he was a child, and the way he understands music is very interesting.
As a beginner, I had a hard time reacting to the notes. To help with this, I wrote the letters below the keys.
Samuel called them "cheating stuffs." He told me that I should start learning to read notes directly, not using tricks. Just like little children starting to learn their ABCs, they don’t use other symbols to help memorize the letters.
Samuel taught me to think of this as conversations between my left and right hands. My left hand plays a measure like asking a question, and my right plays the answer.
One day during practice, I made a discovery. While playing the fragments of a composition, I found when I played the piano keys, different directions and combinations have different sounds. Therefore, it expresses different emotions.
If I play from middle C to the piano’s right side, it sounds happy; yet, when I play from middle C to the left side, it sounds sad.
Later as I combined these fragments, and played the complete composition. I could clearly tell that the composition has a mood, just like a tide, it ebbs and flows.
This phenomenon made me think of our lives. Life is like a piano composition, it has both ebb and flow, and you never know when they will happen.
Say when you wake up in the morning, you do not know if your life will ebb or flow. The highs surprise you yet the lows upset you.
I feel like we should still be humble and careful when our current life is on its high; we should be courageous and brave when our life is on its low. Because neither ebb nor flow endures forever, just like the piano and the tide.