What if...?

On the tube this morning I spied a young woman with a telltale box on her back.

Below the sticker that said “nyos” - Google told me this means “National Youth Orchestras of Scotland” - was another sticker that brought me a momentary wistful smile. A smile that said, “what if”.

The sticker said, “The Yehudi Menuhin School”.

This, already back in 1987, was renowned as one of the finest music training schools in the world.

The legendary violinist and teacher “Yehudi Menuhin founded the School to provide an environment and tuition for musically gifted children from all over the world to pursue their love of music, develop their musical potential, and achieve standards of performance on stringed instruments and piano at the highest level.” 

I was 10, in 1987. Two years younger than my own son, whom you see in this videoclip here. That was the year an ABRSM examiner, seeing my potential, asked my parents if he could arrange for me to audition for entry into this prestigious boarding institution.

You can guess the road I did end up taking; after deliberation, it was decided I was too young, the cost too prohibitive, for me to be sent overseas alone aged 10, for a highly music-oriented and therefore perhaps “all eggs in basket”-type education, lacking breadth in other subjects; potentially cripplingly so, should my career path not turn out to be in professional music-making, competitions and concertising and recording. And we classical pianists have it extra high, the stakes; there is no place for us in a regular orchestra, unlike the vast majority of other instruments, even the voice.

Save for the occasional piano ensembles, like chamber music setups, we pianists are forced to aim towards being the soloing superstars, or naught. Otherwise, our alternative is to be the accompanists, or teach. The options presented to us are therefore on a rather reduced scale compared to, say, the options for a violinist.

So my parents said no, thank you. I can’t imagine it was an easy choice. But who said it was ever easy to choose, the roads one ends up taking...?

—-

“What if”.

Like all tools, a potentially dangerous question, if not used with the right skill and intention.

It too easily leads to regret.

A regret that, I’ve slowly learnt to my emergent surprise and wonder over the last 30 years, is often misplaced. Misdiagnosed.

Premature.

As I sit here at my desk, gazing at brain scans in preparation for my class presentation this Thurs on one scientific benefit of meditation (it’s a seminal paper showing evidence suggesting the neural mechanisms by which meditation practice reduces mind-wandering and self-fixation, which are associated with lower levels of happiness:) -

I think back to the class I took, ten years on from my aborted chance at musical success. I was drawing cross-sections of lamb brains, stained and mounted in glass, learning about different parts of the brain’s architecture. It was the compulsory “Introduction to Neurophysiology” paper all of us first-year cognitive psychologists at Oxford had to take.

I loved it. But I found I had no use for it, not going into clinical psych or research thereafter, going into the corporate world instead.

Or so I thought. 

You see - the roads we take take funny twists and turns. 

I spoke about “premature”. Premature giving up, premature writing off, of deciding that this or that “what if”, a branch of our life’s road that we had to give up, walk past, along the way... that these “what if”s are dead, gone, no longer ours to explore.

Well - who says so, exactly...?

Look at what is sitting in front of me, colourful pictures of cerebral hemispheres, lit up like a child’s paint-by-numbers.

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Functional MRI. The amygdala.

They rise up, like friendly ghosts, from the page. Never did I think in the last 20 years since leaving university that I would be sitting here, encountering them again, in a completely unforeseeable context. The fields of affective and contemplative neuroscience were only invented in the last 30 years. This, right here that I’m looking at, the scientific studies of meditation, is where the leading edge is at in the field.

How could I have known that the seeds, scattered on seemingly unyielding ground half a lifetime ago, were perhaps... not premature after all?

And that... all they needed, was time?

—-

Why is this perspective so important to consider?

Simple.

I’m a career coach. A life skills trainer for students and the workforce.

And - I’m a mum.

How can we grownups, we middle-agers, bridging the worlds of how things used to be and how they could be... use the extraordinary power and influence that comes with being this central glue of a societal layer, wisely?

How can we learn from our own emergent narratives, the surprising turns our own paths have taken, the seeming cul-de-sacs, the forgone passions, to... consider, deeply, the advice we dish out to our young people around us?

What are we really telling them, about how to pursue their dreams? Is the narrative we’re painting more... linear, more restrictive, more hopeless, than we realise?

Than life itself is showing us?

—-

It’s a big responsibility, yes.

But a necessary one.

We owe it to them, and to ourselves, to get honest about our own lives led, to date.

And this involves revisiting our “what ifs”.

Because, as I have proven to myself again and again -

It may well turn out that something we thought we’d have to regret forever, was really just waiting for its right time in the sun.

And that, our duty to ourselves is to be continually kind, gentle, and nourishing of our own gifts and passions and desires and dreams.

And to extend the same gentle, loving care to others’ gifts, passions, desires, dreams too.

Now, in the wisdom of adulthood knowing - these can take a jolly long time, to ripen.

And that’s okay.

And that this is true, for all of us.

—-

On this note - the Birthday Book has done something very special this year. They’ve come up with a children’s edition.

54 tender, wise voices have been invited to share what’s in their minds about “The Roads We Take”.

Please do join in the launch event, and get involved in this wonderful and meaningful initiative. Fellow parents, bring your young ones. After all... the choice of life’s road is one that faces each and every single one of us. Every day. What better way to start this conversation with your own kids? ??

Free limited-quantity tickets here. 

Blake sadly can’t join his fellow writers, it being term time for us here. So we recorded this little clip instead.

#life #choices #perspective #time