It's not the end of the world...

It's so funny to me how when I'm in the middle of a bad day, I often feel like every day is going to be like that.  How can I forget so quickly and easily all of the good days I have had?

Yesterday was a lousy day for me trying to get anything done.  The babysitter got sick, so I couldn't go to my teaching gig and I had a fixed idea in my head about how the day was going to look.  Here it was, 8 in the morning and I was already feeling frustrated and overwhelmed!  The little man was wide away and ready to party all day, making it extremely difficult for me to actually sit at the piano and get anything done.  I did 15 minutes of vocal practice, did a load of laundry, put groceries away and made chicken curry.  A pretty remarkable list of tasks accomplished, but not good enough in my mind.  Ah, dreadful perfectionism.

Today started out very differently. Since the forecast calls for rain, I threw the boo boo in the stroller at 7:45am this morning to get a good walk in before it's impossible to do so.  We both really need to get out of this damn house, and it makes bedtime a lot easier for him later.  After the walk, we both ate breakfast and he crashed until 11:30am.  I practiced for nearly two hours and actually felt the most productive I have in almost a week.  Amazing!  I also made soup during this time.  Double amazing!

What was especially surprising to me, was that after spending a few days really working on my original tune "In September", I actually made a few changes to it.  It surprised me that once I got beyond the surface, I noticed that although I love the vision of the piece, there were actually a few redundant chords.  I had forgotten about this type of subtlety that you can get to when you actually go deeper into the piece.  I am really happy with the way it's coming together and I am almost completely off book with it.  I also discovered a few lovely cluster voices that work beautifully over the middle section.

I hope that I can remember days like today when I am faced with another version of yesterday.