Ryan's Journal

So I was having dinner with an old friend back in Minnesota one day. She tells me my old piano teacher still talks about me. My last piano teacher of many, many years, the former president of the Minnesota Music Teachers Association, one of the best pianists I've ever known, and a particularly great jazz pianist, a skill I utterly regret not learning from her. So good at what she does that she has to be supremely picky about her students these days. What my piano teacher says though... She claims I could have been great (ego rises), but I never put in the effort to get there (ego deflates).

And I wonder. That hits too close to home. It's too familiar.

Passion's a funny thing. I can't get into something like piano deeply, as in best-I-can-be depth, without a passion for it. But I know I won't recognize any passion for piano or anything else without diving in head first and damn the consequences.

They say passion is sustained by constantly looking at the goal. Maybe I just didn't care about the end goal of piano lessons. Maybe I didn't even know what that goal was. Whatever the case was ten, fifteen years ago, it has to stop being the case now.

Whatever 2003 was really about (I had some dorky resolution for using up my phone minutes in a month, which, as it turns out, is not very difficult, even for me), I think 2004 will be a year about unearthing passion. It will have to be.