I missed the midday bell on Monday.  I wasn't going to tell you, I admit.  There is not a good story behind it.  I simply made a mistake.  High noon came and went, and the tolling of the bell did not occur until after the correct moment had passed.  I failed to do what I intended to do, and for a few moments, I wanted to quit everything, to stop the piece, to give up my practice and go home, get drunk, break my promises and call it over.  Instead, I sat on the steps of the sanctuary and tried to breathe, to get my head around all the hyper-reactivity and be a grown up.  It seemed to me that I needed to do something drastic in order to demonstrate how much my failure hurt me.  I feared that to let it go by without marking the event would mean that it didn't matter, and I needed to know that it mattered. 

I remember a jury I had to play back in music school, in 1995.  I had just started practicing meditation, and was counting on my new skill to magically induce total focus and presence during my performance.  I was playing some un-noteworthy Baroque dance on viola, and had prepared it adequately, I suppose, but I had a bit of performance anxiety, and often got a little shaky onstage, which is to say, I usually covered the lower half of my instrument in tears while I played.  That day, standing in the small recital hall in front of a handful of professors, I took to noticing my breath, my body, feeling grounded.  The first few minutes went pretty well.  And then I made a mistake.  It is a mercy that I do not remember exactly what the mistake was anymore, because I think I did remember it for a few years.  I made this mistake, and then I kept thinking of the mistake.  I tried to rewind my thoughts, to see where things went wrong, how it had happened, how it could have happened, replaying the sound of it in my head.  This was a bigger mistake, because I was doing it while playing the rest of the piece, and I began to feel the salt water gathering in a little pool on my chin rest as the notes came though without life, without breath, just empty muscle memory.  My teacher, Igor, gave me a look of disappointment, maybe.  I couldn't say for sure because I would not have been able to see such a look from beyond the blinding light of the stage, but I felt it, and was outraged that he would shame me at a time like that, when I was clearly so broken by my own failure.  I imagined that he felt he'd failed, too, that I embarrassed him in front of the other professors.

Earlier that year, Igor had me over for dinner at his house.  His wife was in Russia, and he apologized that he would have to do the cooking.  He brought fried red potatoes and bratwurst to the tiny, crooked kitchen table, where we'd already gotten going on a few pints of dark ale and half his box of Benson and Hedges.  (This is an integral part of the legacy of artistic apprenticeship, I assure you.  After a recital the following year, Igor announced, finishing a bottle of Stolitchnaya, the loss of his colleague to liver disease, "Alcoholism is the illness of our art form," he said, in an oddly triumphant embrace.)  I remember only one exchange from dinner.  He asked me pedagogically, "Karen, what makes a good teacher a good teacher?"  This question seemed to be an invitation to be brilliant and insightful, and I took a few moments composing my answer before spilling some bullshit about languages of empathy.  I'd barely gotten going when he said, "No.  No, Karen.  There is only one answer.  A teacher is good if the student can PLAY.  Tell me, what do I have to do to get you to play?"

Whatever it was, he hadn't done it before my jury.  Whether I wanted him to see he was not at fault, or that my suffering outweighed his, I really showed everyone, by running offstage and sobbing audibly in the wings.  He told me at my next lesson that I was going to have to grow up at some point.  It hurt, like most truths, and Monday I heard him again.  I'd love to tell you that I marched on with integrity and wisdom, having been humbled and taught by the pain of failure.  But that's not what happened.  Not yet anyway.  I acted like a brat for a few hours, played the bells badly at sunset, and went to bed a mess.  Today I'm here and human, and looking squarely at the fact of myself.  I see that this is not a great story.  But I'm starting to think that lack of greatness is important, too.  Not because we need any more mediocrity, but as far as I can tell, most of us do not harbor a surplus of awareness about it.  I tend to overlook, ignore or deny my failed attempts, meanwhile losing their spacious, simple wisdom. 

I decided to write a letter to an imaginary successor, who would take over my practice of ringing the bells everyday at the sun and moon transits, and found myself expressing the need for vigilance.  This brought me back to the story of Jesus (yes, that guy again) in the garden of Gethsemane, telling his disciples to keep watch, and coming back to find them asleep.  He was disappointed, but he didn't send them home.  And they didn't give up trying to be there for him.  They stayed with him through the night and the next unfathomable day, making mistakes, maybe quietly obsessing about their mistakes, and walking alongside him anyway.  We fall asleep sometimes.  Even during our own devotion, our own dances, and we must wake ourselves from the dizzying rumination of our failure and move through the piece!  Play every note, one at a time, with breath, with our living eyes open.  I am trying.