Incompleteness, new challenges, and Quality

It's amazing to me the way things move, shift, morph, and skew while always staying fundamentally the same. An odd bank shot in billiards, an unexpected bounce off the backboard in basketball, a pop fly that turns into a run; things change while the game goes on. I've felt - always, I think - that my life was a life in a constant state of incompleteness. Constantly moving towards something, I know not what, but in a state of motion nonetheless. Sometimes it feels so normal to me that I wonder how others exist any other way.

For example: there was a point in my life where I knew, beyond any doubt, that my path was connected to Music. How that has actually played out, though, the literal path that I have followed, was of no conscious design. Piano, singing, 'cello, electric bass , back to singing, back to bass (but acoustic this time), adding some singing back in to the bass work, and back to piano - there's only one common thread, and that is Change. I see now in retrospect that I have always sought to place new challenges in front of myself. There is a part of my nature that craves a new goal to achieve, and tends to want to accomplish that in the shortest possible time. Not a short-cut, but more of a fast track to the next thing, or next level. The good aspect of this is a (relatively) broad range of knowledge and experience. The downside is never having a sense of arrival, of achieving a peak of some sort. The peak is a goal, and the sides of the mountain are the challenge. And the sides of the mountain wouldn't exist were it not for the peak! The Journey is everything. Which leads to the concept of Quality.

Re-reading Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has been a great diversion over the past few days. It was probably 25 years ago that I first read it, and I'm discovering that little of it stuck, but that makes the rediscovery all that much more enjoyable. The scenes where the narrator is (literally) rediscovering his past in the context of the University teaching scene are especially resonant. If there is a constant within my aforementioned constant of Change, it is the search for Quality in whatever it is I'm doing. The beauty of piano technology is that there is an artistic level to the work itself, and also to the result made manifest, i.e. the performance on the instrument. Performing Quality work, so that the artist may perform Quality work in turn. Very cool stuff.

There is an opportunity which seems to be presenting itself to me beyond Tanglewood which will involve some hard thinking and choices, but also seems to be leading me down that familiar road I've traveled so often. Exciting times!