By whose rules are you playing?
Photo by Sarah Hannigan
My son started piano lessons when he was seven years old. In the beginning especially, the learning curve is so steep and there are so many, many rules. For Reuben, rules translate into a lot of someone else telling him what to do, when what he most longs for is to be in charge of his own life. Don’t we all?
Being a kid is full of others telling you what to do. Parents, teachers and other adults are constantly, and often unconsciously, creating and putting kids in boxes that define what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, what is appropriate and what is not, what can be done and what cannot.
As adults, we do have more say in our experience of life. But these "voices" from our past don’t just magically go away. It takes a concerted effort to hear our own voice amidst all the others vying for space in our head, but with conviction and perseverance we can do it. We will likely need to spend a good deal of time undoing at least some, if not many, of the rules we inherited along the way. With time and attention we can attain exactly what we wanted when we were little...to run our own show. Of course there is the issue of doing that in the midst of others, but that is for another question...
