So this is a book with suggestions for novel ways of defining ourselves, others, and the world we live in – ways that may be more apt for challenges of our time. It uses the metaphor of music, and relies on all the arts. Art, after all, is about rearranging us, creating juxtapositions, emotional openings, startling presences, flight paths to the eternal.
A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding business. One sends back a telegram saying: “SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES”. The other writes back triumphantly: “GLORIOUS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES”.
The frames our minds create define -and confine- what we percieve to be possible. Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the area, and new opportunities appear.
A simple way to practice “it’s all invented” is to ask yourself this question:
What assumptions am I making
That I’m not aware I’m making,
That gives me what I see.
And when you have an answer to that question, ask yourself this one:
What might I now invent,
That I haven’t yet invented,
That would give me other choices.
When you are oriented to abundance, you care less about being in control, and you take more risks. You may give away short-term profits in pursuit of a bigger dream; you may take a long view without being able to predict the outcome. In the measurement world, you set a goal and strive for it. In the universe of possibility, you set the context and let life unfold.
“Each student in this class will get an A for the course” I announce. “However, there is one requirement that you must fulfill to earn this grade: sometime during the next two weeks, you must write me a letter dated next May, which begins with this words, “Dear Mr Zander, I got my A because…” and in this letter you are to tell, in as much detail as you can, the story of what will have happened to you by next May that is in line with this extraordinary grade.”
I actively train my students that when they make a mistake, they are to lift their arms in the air, smile, and say. “How fascinating” I recommend that everyone tries this.
My teacher, the great cellist Gaspar Cassadó, used to say to us as students: “I’m so sorry for you, your lives have been so easy. You can’t play great music unless your heart’s been broken.”
In some Asian cultures, a high premium is traditionally put on being right. The teacher is always right, and the best way for students to avoid being wrong is not to say anything at all. “I am number 68, but Mr Zander says I am an A. One day I discover much happier A than number 68. So I decide I am an A.” This student, in a brilliant flash, had hit upon the “secret of life”. He had realized that the labels he had been taking so seriously are human inventions -it’s all a game. The number 68 is invented and the A is invented, so we might as well choose to invent something that brightens our life and the lives of the people around us.
Second fiddlitis: People who perceive their role in a group to be of little significance (second violins for example) are particularly vulnerable to its ravages. The string players in an orchestra often see themselves as redundant foot soldiers.Remember that you are an A student. An A student is a leading player in any class, an integral voice, and the class cannot make its music without that voice. Once, in Spain, I saw a big sign outside a little shop. It read: ALVAREZ.Shoemaker and Lessons in Second Violin.I found myself hoping that Alvarez’s great humility did not irrevocably limit the aspirations of his students.
Usually the impetus for transforming your own past will come from a feeling of hopelessness in the present.
He began gently stroking my hair for a period of time that I wished would have lasted an eternity. Today, as you played us the Chopin, tears came to my eyes. It struck me that while Father could not say these words, “I love you”, they were expressed even more poignantly in the gentle stroking of a little boy’s hair by his father’s powerful hands. I recall that as he sat with me my asthma attack subsided.
We keep looking so hard in life for the “specific message”, and yet we are blinded to the fact that the message is all around us, and within us all the time. We just have to stop demanding that it be in OUR terms or conditions, and instead open ourselves to the possibility that what we seek may be in front of us all the time.
There are stranded starfish as far as the eye can see, for miles up the beach. What difference can saving a few of them possibly make? Smiling, she bends down and once more tosses a starfish out over the water, saying serenely, “It certainly makes a difference to this one”.
I settled on a game called I am contribution. Unlike success and failure, contribution has no other side. It is not arrived at by any comparison. All at once I found that the fearful question, “Is it enough?” and the even more fearful question, “Am I loved for who I am, or for what I have accomplished?” could both be replaced by the joyful question “How will I be a contribution today?”.
Life as games: When in this book we refer to various activities of life as “games”, we do not mean to imply these activities are frivolous or make no difference. We are simply pointing to the fact that any accepted model for doing things comes with an implicit set of rules, and that these rules govern our behavior just as surely as the rules of baseball govern the movements of the players on the field.
Half the fun of playing games like baseball —or the kind that come in a box— is that they challenge us to adapt and hone our skills to win in a distinctive environment that itself can be packed away, or left, once the game is over. It is the nature of games to provide alternative frameworks for engagement and expression and growth.
The purpose of describing, say, your professional life or your family traditions as a game is twofold. You instantly shift the context from one of survival to one of opportunity for growth. You also have the choice of imagining other games you might prefer to play in these realms. Naming your activities as a game breaks their hold on you and puts you in charge.
Sarah’s Seat: “I always sit here”, she said. I challenged her good-naturedly, “Who knows, Sarah, if you change your seat maybe something new will happen today.” Sarah took up the gauntlet. “Are you crazy? At my age? I’m eighty-three!” (…)
One lady asked in a heavy German Jewish accent, “Vy do you bother to come here? You’re a talented young man. Vy do you vaste your time vit a bunch of old people like us?”
Quite taken aback, I confessed that earlier that day, I had asked myself exactly the same question. “But so much has happened since then…”, I began. I searched for words to explain the intense involvement, the excitement, and the peace I felt at that moment. My eyes lit on Sarah. “When I walked in here, Sarah was in the fifth row, and now she is in the fourth!”. And Sarah stood, raised her fist, and cried “You Ain’t seen nothing yet, I just got started!” Then all of us began to clap, and we clapped and clapped and clapped. The applause went far beyond the point of clapping for Sarah. We were clapping for the joy of being alive.
“There is no such thing as bad weather”, he used to say, “only inappropiate clothing.”
Four young men sit by the bedside of their dying father. The old man, with his last breath, tells them there is a huge treasure buried in the family fields. The sounds around him crying, “Where, where?” but it is too late. The day after the funeral and for many days to come, the young men go out with their picks and shovels and turn the soil, digging deeply into the ground from one end of each field to the other. They find nothing and, bitterly disappointed, abandon the search.
The next season the farm has its best harvest ever.
White sheets. With the intention of providing a conduit for orchestra members to be heard, I initiated a practice of putting a blank sheet of paper on every stand in each rehearsal. The players are invited to write down any observation or coaching for me that might enable me to empower them to play the music more beautifully. At first I braced myself for criticism, but surprisingly the responses on the “white sheets”, as they have come to be called, rarely assume that form.
A monumental question for leaders in any organization to consider is: How much greatness are we willing to grant people? Who am I being that they are not shining?
Two prime ministers are sitting in a room discussing affairs of state. Suddenly a man bursts in, apoplectic with fury, shouting and stamping and banging his fist on the desk. The resident prime minister admonishes him: “Peter”, he says, “kindly remember Rule Number 6”, whereupon Peter is instantly restored to complete calm, apologizes, and withdraws. The politicians return to their conversation, only to be interrupted yet again twenty minutes later by an histerical woman gesticulating wildly, her hair flying. Again the intruder is greeted with the words: “Marie, please remember Rule Number 6.” Complete calm descends once more, and she too withdraws wit a bow and an apology. When the scene is repeated for a third time, the visiting prime minister adresses his colleague: “My dear friend, I’ve seen many things in my life, but never anything as remarkable as this. Would you be willing to share with me the secret of rule number six?”. “Very simple”, replies the resident prime minister. “Rule number 6 is “Don’t take yourself so g—damn seriously”. “Ah,” says his visitor, “that is a fine rule”. Afer a moment of pondering, he inquires, “And what, may I ask, are the other rules?”. “There aren’t any”.
Dear Ben, (…) I know that I was mentally exhausted, and we all kept missing notes and entrances. “Take it straight through the second movement,” you said to us, “and NO mistakes”. I don’t know about anyone else, but all my muscles tensed, and I wanted nothing more than to run away and crawl into a hole. You must have sensed this, because you thought a moment and then said, “If you make a mistake… a five-hundred-pound cow will fall on your head.” Partly from the image, and partly from the complete surprise of hearing that word out of your mouth, we all began to laugh, and everything was better, including the Bartok. I don’t think anything could have relaxed or empowered me more at that moment than the word “cow”. — Kate Bennett, from her final white sheet as a graduating member of the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra.
This music is some of the most intimate, soft, subtle, and delicate in the repertoire. It depends for its expression on an understanding of the nuances of sadness, vulnerability, and never-ending loss. But when Jeffrey began to sing, there was no trace of melancholy. Out poured a glorious stream of rich, resonant, Italian-ate sound. Pure Jeffrey, taking himself very seriously. How could I induce him to look past himself in order to become a conduit for the expressive passion of the music?
The level of playing of the average orchestral player is much higher than it used to be in Mahler’s day. So when Mahler wrote difficult passages for particular instruments, like the high-flying “Frère Jacques” tune for solo double bass in the third movement of the First Symphony, he was almost certainly conveying, musically, the sense of vulnerability and risk he saw as an integral part of life. 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. This heart-stopping moment, conveying the first crack in the cold grip of the Russian winter, can only be truly represented if the player has to strain every fiber of his technical resourced to accomplish it. A bassoon player for whom it was easy would miss the expressive point. And when told by a violinist that a difficult passage in the violen concerto was virtually unplayable, Stravinsky is supposed to have said: “I don’t want the sound of someone playing this passage, I want the sound of someone trying to play it!”
Being with the way things are by:
- Clearing Shoulds. When we dislike a situation, we tend to put all our attention on how things should be rather than how they are.
- Closing the Exits: Escape, Denial and Blame. Closing the exits means staying with the feelings, whatever they are.
- Clearing Judgements. When a splendid osprey eats a beautiful fish, it is neither good or bad. Or, it’s good for the osprey and bad for the fish. Nature makes no judgement. Humans do.
When one rises above a work to see the long line, the overarching structure, one can see and hear a new meaning, oftern far beyond the meaning viewed from the ground.
The plane that carried me home from Washington at noon that day was the same one I had taken there, with the same crew in attendance. Recognizing me, a flight attentant asked, “Didn’t you just arrive here with us on the eight o’clock?” And I had the pleasure of repeating my father’s words: “Certain things in life are better done in person”.
Rename yourself as the board on which the whole game is played. You move the problematic aspect of any circumstance from the outside world inside the boundaries of yourself. With this act you can transform the world.
However, inasmuch as I blame you, to that degree, in exactly that proportion, I lose my power. I lose my ability to steer the situation in another direction, to learn from it, I lose any leverage I may have had, because there is nothing I can do about your mistakes -only about mine.
The I/you approach:
He says: Give me a raise or I’m quitting my job. His employer passes the buck, or tries to appease him, or lies to him, or tries to get him to put off acting on his decision.
Compare this to the WE approach, in which the assumption is that the entity of the WE, the in-between, is forever evolving, forever in motion. Often just the use of the word we can shift the direction things takes.
The WE approach:
He says: We’re apparently both happy with my work, and I sense our loyalty is mutual. Yet this salary doesn’t support the other commitments in my life. What do WE want to have happen here? How can WE make the whole things work?
Legend has it that an encounter took place between King Christian X of Denmark and a Nazi officer shortly after the occupation of the Danish capital in April 1940. It is said that when the King looked out the window of the palace and saw the Nazi flag with its swastika flying over the roofs of the government buildings, he called for a meeting with the commander of the occupying forces. The King requested the flag be removed. The Nazi officer refused.
King Christian walked a few feet away, and spent some moments in thought. He approached the officer once more. “And what will you do if I send a soldier to take it down?” “I will have him shot”, the officer replied. “I don’t believe you will”, said the King quietly, “when you see the soldier I send”. The soldier demanded that the sovereign explained himself. King Christian said, “I will be the soldier”. The flag came down within the day.
Often the experience of a personal crisis or a failure will constitute a basis for the creation of a personal vision, which in turn becomes the framework for a life of possibility. Alice Kahana, an artist living in Houston, has a painful and vivid memory of her journey to Auschwitz as a fifteen-year-old-girl. On the way, she became separated from her parents and found herself in charge of her little eight-year-old brother. When the boxcar arrived, she looked down and say that the boy was missing a shoe. “Why are you so stupid”” she shouted at him, the way older sisters are inclined to do. “Can’t you keep track of your things?” This was nothing out of her ordinary except that those where the last words that passed between them, for they were herded into different cars and she never saw him again.
Nearly half a century later, Alice Kahana is still living by a distinction that was conceived in that maelstrom. She vowed not to say anything that could not stand as the last thing she ever said. Is she 100 percent successful? We would have to presume not. But no matter: Such a distinction is not a standard to live up to, but a framework of possibility to live into.
As a teacher I have an enormous opportunity to create possibility in every conversation.
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