Today is a good day. I feel good, though it is a rainy kind of day. Perhaps i feel good because it is a rainy kind of day. It doesn’t really matter, it is nice to have a good day. To feel refreshed in the morning, to feel alert, alive, enthusiastic. Okay, well perhaps not enthusiastic, but alive and alert, positive even.

Not all days are like that for me, I am often awoken, feeling tired and depressed. I recently read that this happens because my sleep cycle is not properly oriented to the place I am living. The challenge is it will be out of sync no matter where I live. so some days, I wake up and have a not so good day. Some days are terrible really. Not today, but on those not good days I am reminded of Yitzhak Perlman.

Once he was giving a concert in New York and during the middle of one of the pieces the orchestra was playing, one of Yitzhak’s violin strings broke. Now on a 4 stringed instrument, losing a string and then playing a concert of that quality is unthinkable for most people. Yitzhak, however, nodded to the conductor to begin the piece, and the audience could watch him recomposing the piece in his mind as he played, inventing new fingerings and drawing new sounds from his now 3 stringed violin. At the end of the concert, Yitzhak remarked “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”

I think on every day this is our task, I think it is especially our task when we are having a not good day. How much music-life we can still make with what we have left in us that day.

Today I have a lot, tomorrow who knows, but I hope and pray that I will have the strength to still make music out of what I have left.