Lisa's story
Lisa came to the piano late. She loved it as a girl but had some very traumatic experiences with lessons, which lingered for decades. She'd wanted to play her whole life.
She came to me because someone had suggested she put her life story into a theatre musical, and she wanted to repair her relationship with the piano first. We spent our sessions exploring an intuitive approach to playing in all 12 keys. No sheet music, chords, scales, or note names. It was just her hands on the keys, one small idea at a time... listening, feeling, and playing.
In our sessions and her own practice, she'd sit down, something interesting would start to move, and then it would stop.
"I'll have like a big wave and then it stops. Then I go and as soon as I'm in my head, I stop."
This wasn't a technique or a theory deficit. It was that her inner critic was loud and hair-trigger. Nobody had ever shown her another way to be at the piano other than: Get it right or be quiet.
Then one week in her practice she lost that wave mid-phrase, the way she always did, and braced for the rebuke.
"I kind of got lost for a minute, you know, and then I thought, oh f--- it."
And kept going.
"It just felt so magical," she told me after. "I didn't have to keep a structure. I felt like I could do so much more."
She wasn't more skilled that week. She hadn't learned anything new. What changed was her timing.
What that means
We are walking receivers. Sensations, thoughts, impulses move through us all the time, but we usually shrug them off.
But when we sit down to create something, that changes. Now we're noticing them more. And there's a beat before we respond. In that beat, the part of us that reacts is much faster than the part of us that decides.
So the old reaction gets there first almost every time. Not because it's better. It's just quicker.
That's a timing problem, and it goes both ways. Sometimes we answer too soon, before we've taken in what's happening. Sometimes we wait so long the moment goes by without us.
In that moment, Lisa didn't grasp more music theory or get better at a technique. She decided to show up more fully, more willingly and courageously, in the moment. She heard the critic start up, and she answered it with a more complete awareness of who she was at that time, and who she most wanted to be going forward.
Maybe you know a version of this
Think of a time when you had just the right thing to say, but then... you worried about how it might land, so you softened it. Then you softened it again, and by the time it came out it was a total dud.
Or you finally got a week off, and you'd been looking forward to some real down time. Then you scheduled it to the brim, ran every minute at peak efficiency, and turned each day into a race between your competency and the clock.
Maybe there's a piano in your house you've been walking past for years (decades?). Now and then you imagine sitting down and being able to play something you (and others) would enjoy. Then you picture all you think that would take before you'd be there (multiple hours a week for...?) and the idea goes back on the shelf for yet another year.
Different stories, same beat. I've been hamstrung by all three.
I don't see these as character flaws anymore, in myself or in anyone else. It's timing.
And timing can be practiced.
I've been helping people with this now for twelve years, drawing from decades of experience playing music, improvising on- and off-stage with others, and deeply observing my own creative discernment process. Hundreds of people have learned what can happen in their thoughts, feelings, and actions as they engage this safe, evocative, and fun practice for connecting with and expressing themselves in real time.
Here's what a current scientific philosopher is saying about how we relate to the present moment. i.e. how we do timing.
What the science found
Maria Popova wrote an essay in June called "Now Yourself." It's about a book by the science writer Jo Marchant, an investigation into what the present moment actually is.
Read the essay at The Marginalian.
In the middle of it sits something I find fascinating, validating, and just plain fun (yep, genuine geek here).
Dan Lloyd is a philosopher who studies brain scans. He went looking for how the mind builds the feeling of time passing. He expected to find a clock. Instead, he found music being made.
Short repeating motifs, four to eleven seconds long. Rhythms coming back at steady intervals. Frequencies nested inside each other so cleanly he called the structure harmony, after the overtones that give a violin its richly resonant sound.
He titled the paper "The Musical Structure of Time in the Brain." The brain doesn't count the seconds. It composes them.
As Popova put it, the present now moment is "more like music than like mathematics."
I couldn't agree more. The mind isn't keeping time. It's making it.
(Mathematics, as I see it, is an ancient, heroic, somewhat jealous, and staggeringly inefficient attempt to become musical.)
Listen. Feel. Play.
Here's what that means in everyday terms. The mind isn't checking off a fixed timeline. It's guessing what happens next, checking the guess against what actually shows up, and adjusting as it goes.
So every moment is quietly asking three questions, whether we ever put words to them or not.
What is happening now? Who am I now? What do I do now?
Listen. Feel. Play. In that order, over and over, for a whole life.
Each question takes an amount of time to address. Not the same amount. Just enough before moving to the next one.
This is the timing we could all pay more attention to.
Usually, we answer on auto-pilot, from habits, patterns, and beliefs picked up so early nobody remembers choosing them. In all three of those situations above, the questions still got asked, and every one of them got an answer.
Just not from anybody who was really home.
The derivation of the word "improvise" may surprise you.
Improvise: in (not/without), pro (before), vis (seen). Unforeseen. To work with what can't be seen ahead of time.
That isn't a talent. It's not being quick-witted. And it's not about being stage-worthy.
To practice improvisation is to practice dealing with not knowing what's coming. When you think about it, it's a pretty good practice for reality.
Every conversation, every open afternoon, every hard decision arrives with its own surprises. We're all improvising, all day long. Most of us were trained to deal with reality by trying to turn all unknowns into knowns rather than accepting uncertainty as the natural fabric of our existence.
Why a piano
Most guides to piano improvisation start with note names, scales, chord voicings, etc. Those all have their place. But I'm not talking about learning to play other people's music expertly. I'm talking about learning to play with sound truthfully.
Essentially, this method is piano improvisation for beginner's mind, so you can fight less and play more. Beginner's mind isn't a consolation prize for people who started late. It's the state where the fight hasn't set in yet, or where it finally gets to let go.
A piano is a good place to practice this because a wrong move costs nothing. It doesn't need you to be right. It doesn't remember the last note you missed. It has no opinion about your childhood. You press a key and it answers, right now, and it tells the truth about whether you listened before you played.
And when the critic shows up at the keys, and it will, you'll hear it in the sounds and feel it in your body in real time. And you can adjust in real time as well, however you choose to. That's the part that carries over into the rest of your life. Not a trick for silencing it. Practice at staying present while it talks and answering anyway.
What Lisa couldn't have seen
Lisa has written that musical. She's preparing to take it to the stage, in the United States and in Ireland. That one she'd been carrying for years.
Two others she hadn't. This piano work led her to marrying a musician she now plays with, and to building a program that helps other people turn their own life stories into musical theatre. She couldn't have foreseen any of that.
Marchant ends her book with "the future isn't written after all." The moment is still being made, right now, and each of us has a hand in making it, whether we're doing that in full consciousness or not.
That's the real stakes. I think we should never live in exile from our nature. Unfortunately, most of us spend far too long in a cruel and unnecessary endurance test with that separation, one swallowed line, one productive week, one closed lid at a time.
What's on the other side of that isn't just feeling better. It's being able to act on purpose, and with some grace, in moments that actually count.
And this isn't a private matter either. Someone who can meet their own moment is different to be around, and that ripples out. How far isn't ours to know.
Try it
If you'd like to see what it's like to finally allow yourself to feel this more deeply, here's something easy.
Sit at a piano or keyboard or any surface that rings a little. A drum can work, too. Play one note. Just the one. Listen all the way to the end of it, until the sound is gone.
Somewhere in that fade you'll notice a little itch to play the next note early. That itch is worth meeting. It's a close cousin of the one that sends a reply before the question has fully landed.
Let the next note arrive when something in you genuinely chooses it.
That's one full pass. Listen, feel, play. Keep noticing.
Where to start
I made a short, free practice for exactly this. I call it the Listening Door. Fifteen minutes, no instrument or musical background required. It walks you into listening first, which is where every pass begins, and it's the simplest way I know to meet your own timing and your own critic on better terms.
If you'd rather understand the thinking underneath all this first, my philosophy page is here.
Practicing your ability to respond authentically in real time matters whether you walk through either of these doors or not. The moment keeps arriving either way, and being there for it, awake, is a capacity that feeds your life and everything it touches.
Blessings onward,
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