<blockquote>Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.</blockquote>
We live in a world of Thou Shalt Nots. Remember life as a child? Frequently our view of the world and immediate surroundings around us were shaped by prohibitions against dangerous situations.
“Don’t touch that. It’s not.”
“Don’t cross the road until I’m there.”
“Don’t annoy me.”
This is not necessarily wrong. In prehistoric times, the key to staying alive was actually not to get yourself into dangerous situations that might actually kill you. That is just how evolution has shaped us.
But there must be a balance drawn in this kind of admonishment, and the daring to explore outside of those boundaries.
If we only live life guided by prohibitions, we would find ourselves increasingly boxed in as the number of rules increase with life.
We can take our lead from the field of music. The Impressionist composer, Claude Debussy, who wrote many works including Clare de Lune, was a student at Paris Conservatory, where he famously failed many of his theory exams. His crime? Trying to be different. Schooled in the harmonic traditions of Bach and other composers, Debussy found it difficult not to experiment beyond these boundaries, and the conventions of the time did not suit him. Eventually he found some form of reconciliation between the past and the inventive path he wished to follow. The Impressionist phase in music is often seen as the point in Classical music history where the break that would eventually lead to harmonic dissonance and jazz chords being commonplace in modern music occurred. Had Debussy been governed by his Shalt Nots, the course of music history might have been delayed by a decade or two, or perhaps gone on a divergent path. You can read more about this on the Piano Teacher Finsbury Park blog.
Daring to be different is a way to push past existing boundaries. But maybe we should push just slightly, and not so much that the boundaries break, but ever so slightly that they bend, to have more space for our selves to grow – it is about finding a balance.