Four claustrophobic little music classrooms and a dance classroom with a scuffed wooden floor and smudged, uneven wall mirrors. There are glaring fluorescent lights and a heating and air conditioning system that leaves every room either sweat-dripping hot or joint-stiffening cold.
It falls a bit short of glamorous.
It is simply where I am, most days, for hours on end.
It is my little world, which I have realized anew, fits me like a glove (one of those 3 dollar stretchy ones that come in every possible color, but sometimes doesn't come all the way to your knuckles on every finger).
I am sitting and trying my hardest to form a bunch of numbers into a spreadsheet...I am always easily distracted during such tasks...when through the air and also through our supposedly soundproof walls (umm, who did we pay for that job?) drifts a hauntingly beautiful piano piece. Then I hear the distinct high pitched exclamation of a teacher who is seeing the reward for their labors. So I slip out of the office into the entryway just outside of the classroom of a teenage piano student, Maria.
Slowly, doors to some of the music rooms begin to open as people are drawn by the melody to the classroom. People begin surrounding the piano and peering over shoulders in the doorway. She keeps playing...her teacher, Isabel, is bursting with pride and slipping in little comments to her student as fingers glide over the keys.
As the song finishes and the "audience" cheers for this accomplished teenager, I pause to take it all in. Maria's face is flushed from deep concentration and all the compliments that follow. Across the hall there is the resonant zip of the strings from the electric guitar class, it is almost overpowered by the loud stomping of the nail-soled flamenco shoes against the floor of the dance classroom, though their force is softened by the accompanying sweet clack of the castanets.
Our little school is filled with people who cannot stay away.
it is Art.
Creativity and beauty, hard work and accomplishment. Art can seem so frivolous, somewhat dispensable, when in truth it is completely intrinsic and necessary. It very much is. Why on earth would people pay so much money for piano lessons in the middle of a crashing economy? Why would a middle aged woman sign up for ballet classes for the first time in her life? Not because they will necessarily learn a trade that will help them pay the bills. Not because they will all leave professionals.
They do it because they simply must.
I absolutely love this. Taking in this picture of our little academy, I could feel my heart beat a little more clearly in the sweet recognition of that fact.
Mopping the floors, doing administrative work, answering phones...the majority of my hours are absorbed in the mundane. But then, these banal hours are so clearly outweighed by the satisfying moments I find watching my little girls master a lovely arabesque, losing myself in the rich movement of my modern dance class, or crowding into the little classroom in order to witness the impromptu piano recital.
So, I am feeling a little sentimental about it all. (hey, I'm an artist...) I can't help but believe we should all have these moments in our life. Find our little corner of the world and find contentment in that. Be inspired by what we spend our hours on, inspired enough to write such a sappy blog about it.
Maybe it will help to reread this tomorrow when I am not able to focus on those spreadsheets...?
