Being a musician, I have faced many tests of faith, but never more so than now. If you play an instrument, you will realise that playing one is a labour of love, and more often than not, you play it for yourself. Because no one can ever truly appreciate how much you give the instrument, and how little it gives you back.
Playing an instrument is not for the faint hearted. It takes you 10 years to reach an average proficiency, and you spend the rest of your life in a futile struggle trying to maintain it. The skill you have with an instrument is not retainable, which means that if you don't play the piano for one year, you become no better than a Grade 1 toddler tinkling with a keyboard. It is truly frightening how much you can lose, after you have spent all that time building it up.
The worst thing about all this is, in the age of computers, people like us are fast becoming obsolete. We might not want to admit it, but computers can do what humans can never do. Play a piece perfectly, doing it everytime, and the best part is, they don't need to practice. One might argue that computers can never capture the nuances and subtleties of a human's playing, but I know better. It is a matter of time before computers play catch up, and when they do, where does that leave us?
When you play an instrument, you play to perfect it. But if you play an instrument, you will soon realise you can never perfect it. And the more you play, the more you realise you will never perfect it. It begs the question, do you continue to strive for perfection, or do you settle for mediocrity? I don't want to settle, but I can never be more than mediocre, because I can never be perfect. It is a catch-22 no musician wants to face, but it stares at us everyday.
It makes me wonder, why do I still play the piano? I love the instrument, but there is no point in doing it. I will spend every day till I die in a futile struggle to maintain what control I have over the instrument, only to have all my efforts pale in comparison to someone who can manipulate a computer.
However, as much as it is futile, and as much as people like me are fast becoming anachronisms, I will spend these last few paragraphs in a desperate defence of why I will continue to play the piano, and do it till the day I die.
I play it, because when the walls of silence close in upon me, when the music of my life stops playing, my piano sings to me, a lone candle in that impermeable darkness.
I play it, because every time I hit a wrong note, I am reminded of what it is like to be human, how it is normal to err.
I play it, because the difficulty of playing it reminds me of how nothing can be achieved without hours of sacrifice.
I play it, because if I were never able to play it again, I would rather die. In life, there are few things that one can say that about, and that in itself has a value beyond anything one can find in this world.