Sobre Mí
Being present to the way things are is not the same as accepting things as they are in the resigned way of the cow.It doesn’t mean you should drown out your negative feelings or pretend you like what you really can’t stand.Say, for instance, you are on your annual winter vacation in Florida, and rain is pouring down steadily.Surely you won’t like it.You came here expecting sun and warmth, rounds of golf, and lots of time on the beach.The question is, can you be with the whole thing, the rain and your feelings about the rain?If you cannot, you might spend entire days bracing against the truth, complaining how unfair it is, how nobody warned you about the weather patterns, how the hotel ought to refund your money because the brochure showed sunny skies, how wrong your spouse was not to take your advice to go to the resort in Tucson.You might find yourself railing at the heavens, asking why you, personally, are being punished.You would be stuck—and unable to go on from there.If we wanted rain at this time of year, we would have visited our friends in Seattle.Indeed, the capacity to be present to everything that is happening, without resistance, creates possibility.At last you can see.You can leave behind the struggle to come to terms with what is in front of you, and move on.On my first run down the mountain, I slipped and fell on a patch of ice.From then on I became vigilant, tensing up in resistance whenever I spotted ice, and, unfortunately, there was plenty of it.I was about to abandon the project and come back some other time when real skiing was to be had, when suddenly it occurred to me that I had been operating under the assumption that real skiing is skiing on snow.I laughed with what Ben often refers to as cosmic laughter, the laughter that comes from the surprise and delight of seeing the obvious.If I was going to be a New England skier, I had better include ice in my definition of skiing!I redrew the box in my mind, so that now I had it that skiing is skiing on snow and ice.As I started down the next run, my physical self coordinated easily with my new way of thinking.As every skier knows, resistance to ice can take you on quite a painful downward slide, whereas traversing ice as though it is a friendly surface will usually deliver you gracefully to the other side.If we resist them, we may keep on slipping into a posture of defeat.If we include mistakes in our definition of performance, we are likely to glide through them and appreciate the beauty of the longer run.I’ll never forget my surprise when the first horn player of the Boston Philharmonic came to me after a performance of one of the most taxing of Mahler’s symphonies
Firma
in which he had played a magnificent rendition of the incredibly demanding solo horn part.I’m so sorry, he said.For a moment I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about.I was struck that his whole appearance seemed dejected and apologetic.Finally I registered that what had caused his deflation was the fact that he had flubbed two admittedly very exposed high notes in the course of one of his big solo passages.Perhaps his mistake might have seemed an irritant to some in a recording heard over and over again, but in the context of an impassioned performance lasting nearly ninety minutes, it was hardly significant.The level of playing of the average orchestral player is much higher than it used to be in Mahler’s day.For the orchestra and the conductor, playing Mahler’s symphonies means taking huge risks with ensemble, expression, and technique.We will not convey the sense of the music if we are in perfect technical control, so in a sense a very good player has to try harder in these passages than someone for whom they would be a strain, technically.Stravinsky, a composer whom we tend to think of as rather objective and cool, once turned down a bassoon player because he was too good to render the perilous opening to The Rite of Spring.A bassoon player for whom it was easy would miss the expressive point.I don’t want the sound of someone playing this passage, I want the sound of someone trying to play it!
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