Epiphanic Diaries2024-03-28
Mastery and Maturity
Adapted and expanded from a text to my piano teacher after his excellent performance today
Your potential to be anything dies when you decide to become something — and is reborn as the potential to experience oneness as part of the whole.
Oldness is living each day as a narrowing. Maturity is living fully and bigger through your chosen path — an expanding.
When you pick a vocation (or realize you’ve been picked), it can feel like mortality — the first death. Work hard enough to gain facility and fluency, and you reach skilled-humanity: the state where technical skill enables heartfelt gesture.
Beyond the minutiae of task you see again the infinite. This is the first rebirth.
You can make gifts for others — compositions, articles, poems — turning skill into service. You can let the passion of others orient your own, joining the chain of gifts.
Mastery becomes increased potential for expressiveness. Maturity becomes orientation toward contribution.