Have you ever been in the presence of a maestro? I mean someone so in tune with his art that what takes years of practice appears almost effortless.
Perhaps you have heard how energy-draining and time-consuming mastery can be. From the outside, it can seem almost like a masochistic venture. No pain, no gain. Yet when you look closely at the face of the maestro, something is missing. You do not see the pains of practice etched across his face. You see the pleasures of participation.
And perhaps that is where the maestro differs from the rest of us.
Through insight, he has found something that many rarely discover in their pursuits. I call it the maestro’s gold.
In the mind of the maestro, there is no sharp separation between work and play. Work is simply glorified play. To work effectively, one must somehow recover the heart of playfulness.
So the maestro takes up his craft early in the morning and wonders what joys are waiting for him. He is not desperately trying to measure up. He is not performing for admiration. That is the least of his concerns.
His pursuit is not perfection for perfection’s sake. It is union.
He wants to become so acquainted with his craft that it begins to find expression through his thoughts and hands. There is a kind of effortless rhythm, a mysterious flow, where the craft seems to find its own voice without being constantly dictated to.
I love the description of the Brazilian team that won the 1958 World Cup. They were said to have danced their way to victory, bouncing the ball off every muscle of their bodies and making moves nobody thought possible. They made football look less like football and more like basketball.
The ball seemed to have found freedom at their feet.
There was a gleeful liberation in their play that the other teams seemed to lack. And don’t we all love seeing that? Someone so at home in what they do that effort begins to look like play and mastery begins to look like freedom.
Not all of us may be fortunate enough to be called maestros. But perhaps we can cultivate the mindset that makes labour more pleasurable and brings a deeper sense of rhythm and flow into everyday living.
That is what makes everything an art.
Living becomes an art. Relationships become an art. Writing, parenting, studying, creating, even the ordinary business of being human can become an art.
And art is perfected not through grim seriousness or fatalistic obsession, but through grace. Through a certain gentleness and ease. Through becoming flexible enough to accommodate the nuances of the craft itself.
This has little to do with showing off or knowing it all. It is about rhythm. It is about flow. It is about allowing something greater than our rigid plans to find expression through us.
Perhaps that is our vital participation in life.
To become conduits for ideas, beauty and creative sparks that have long been dormant, waiting for someone willing to let them breathe.
Maybe the maestro’s gold is not mastery after all.
Maybe it is the joy of becoming one with what we were made to do.
Restpiration 