Turning Two Pages at Once

Today I was playing the piano, accompanying our valley men's chorus as they performed five songs before a church audience of about 500 people. I wasn't able to practice with them this past week because I was in Denver for a strategic planning committee. A substitute pianist had used my music and accompanied the group during the rehearsal. I was a bit uneasy about going into the performance having not run the songs for a dozen days.

The performance had gone well so far, and we were on the next to last piece. I noticed that the substitute pianist had dogeared the pages so she could more easily turn them. I came to the end of the third page of music and flipped the page just as the song was approaching a key change ... and flipped two pages without realizing it.

It took only a hundredth of an instant for me to realize that the music was not what I should be playing. I scrambled to turn back a page and flipped two back instead of one. In the meantime the 25 or so men had arrived at the key change with no accompanying lead-in.

It was a mess. A few brave souls remembered how the music should go and led the others into the new key. I finally caught up. But we were all so rattled that the rest of the piece was a disaster, ending with my utter massacre of a three-octave riff. It was ugly, with not only the audience but live TV cameras recording the whole pile-up. The director grimaced, and I slunk home afterwards, not staying for the rest of the program.

Turning two pages at once: it puts you in a place that you should have arrived at much later. You miss key transitions along the way. You foreshorten the natural development of the song's trajectory.

It reminds me of when I first started dating Husband. I went on a forest walk in northern California with my pastor, and she listened to my enthused tales of this fine man who was stealing my heart. "Ginger," she cautioned me, "don't try to speed up the natural development of this relationship. Let it take time. It's like letting a fetus grow to full term before birthing it. Every relationship needs time to develop naturally."

At an earlier time, I wanted a leadership job in an academic department in which I worked. It was time to consider the leadership rotation, and I was a little disappointed when the decision was made to continue with the current leader, although my name had been proposed. Looking back on it, I needed those years to continue learning and developing by observing; I would not have done so well had I been thrust into the leadership as soon as I wanted it to happen.

Over and over I have observed this: It doesn't go so well when you "turn two pages at once" in life. A natural development and rhythm has to take place, and we're not such great judges of what that pace should be. There are also key transitions that are necessary to the arc of one's story, smoothing it out and bringing it to satisfying places.

In a world where life rushes by, where children meet adult themes too soon, where celebrity is expected in the course of a 20-week TV season, where people flog their bodies with stress and a lifetime of workload in half the years of their life, perhaps it would be wisest to seek to turn only one page at a time.