“Pianing”

I won’t go back to piano classes, at least not right now. But I began practicing again, as a hobby, no matter when nor how often.

The first impression was I would never be able to play, blaming myself for giving up learning years ago. Then I remembered the first time I had a formal piano class. My fingers were weak and didn’t obey my brain. It was enormously difficult to connect the position of the notes to the finger that was supposed to play them. My impression was, of course, that I would never be able to play.

A couple of days after my first class, the lesson I was studying became easy. It was magical. That’s how people get to recover from a stroke: teaching the brain and giving it some time to process the new information.

And today, after practicing not more than half an hour for two days, I can already notice the difference: even when I type, I can feel my brain connecting to my fingers differently, asking one and not another to type this or that character. Asking me to use all of them.

What really works

She’s a maid, and her husband left her with two kids. For several weeks, she couldn’t stop crying. She as willing to kill herself, saying she had lost her world. As she had stopped eating, she had to be taken to the hospital, where I believe she was given some pills. After two days, I met her by chance again: she was smiling and saying she would get over it.

I’m not sure if it was due to the pills, to the time, or if somebody told her something that made sense to her. What she told me was that her daughters showed a power she never thought they had, cooking to her, cleaning the house, trying to cheer her up. “Next weekend,” she promised, “I’ll take them to the park and we will have a lot of fun together.”