Competing with Oneself

What am I doing when I get up to play for other people?

It is hard to shake the many years of feeling as if every performance is competitive, even when it is not.  But the possibility that I might be competing with myself did not occur to me until a pre-performance chat with a fellow pianist.

Even with maturity it does not get easier to go to the source and find what one needs to know and get the courage to go in pursuit of it.  There are so many factors pulling us down into the pre-judged, not-good-enough mode of much of our learning years.

This learned put-down keeps us from hearing in the here and now, that precious, fleeting moment when Mozart might reach us with a tone or tone relationship that we had never noticed before.