A Symphony

Someone said that living life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning to play the instrument as we go along. This saying describes the experience very well, but no one should worry about that. We are all in this world for exactly that purpose --- to learn.
    While we are learning we do not expect to produce a perfect work. On this plane we are all students, and what matters is that each year we shall find the quality of our workmanship definitely better. People are sometimes depressed because their lives do not present a simple, logical, harmonious unfoldment, because their histories seem to be full of inconsistencies, repetitions, dead ends. This, however, is only to be expected during the learning period.
    Your life has not been rehearsed. It is an adventure, and discovery, and a training, and it is the final goal that matters.
    And let us not be weary in welldoing: for in due season shall we reap, if we faint not (Galatians 6.9).

Around the Year
with Emmet Fox, p.315

~

Jascha Heifetz

Looking at my life I might ask, “So what of us old farts entering the final stretch of our lives and have nothing to show for it? When I was a young man I had dreams and potential that seems to have been squandered. What then, do I live out the rest of my life in regret, or do I try to do something about it to turn in harbor this great lumbering ship of my life around?"

    What of us who seemed to have never been able to get anything but ear shattering squeaks and squawks from this instrument’s strings? To take the metaphor to another level, do I give up or can I find some other instrument that works better for me? Life doesn’t present us with one linear way of working this out. Some of the greatest minds in every field have not been appreciated until long after their candle had burned out. They chose to play a different tuba. Evolution shows that we are a symphony with six and a half billion instruments and this consists of, not only the great soloists (Jascha Heifetz comes to mind), but those whose parts are mostly anonymous in the grand harmonics of the scheme of things.

    My life, excepted as it is and regretted for what it could have been, is to strive on as best I can as an instrument of the Heart of Compassion. It isn’t really up to me to decide what is best now because I yield all of that to the Conductor.

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