As I walk down a street in the new town I just moved to, I see a door. One of those old, magnificent, heavy, imposing doors, but whose walls on one side have been demolished. All that remains is the door, its lock and the illusion of a padlock...
Looking at it from the front, one is taken in by the game of a closed door. Looking at it from the side, we see that it is possible to pass through it to enter this space, where everything is open. From the side, this door is nothing ! Just a game of the mind.
Isn't life this great scenery in which we sometimes end up getting lost by wanting to see it "from the front", by wanting to be "straight" like a woodpecker ?
To get lost is also to learn to find oneself. Not to find "the" way. But to find : oneself.
And this is what the Christmas season often questions : one's "home".
What is it ? How is it about ?
As in an orchestra, it is impossible to tune in if no one is paying attention to anyone. But it is also impossible to play a symphony if no musician has first learned to play his own instrument.
This is the art of being a virtuoso in one's life. His very first instrument.
My path as a musician, as an artist, what we call a skin deep sensitivity, is in reality that of an apprenticeship between "outside" and "inside", between traveling in all worlds while knowing how to return home.
The problem is never to be sensitive but to not know how to be in connection or what to do with this own sensitivity. Thus, being sometimes more sensitive to the other than to oneself, not being able to hear oneself but the other instrument monopolizing one's listening, the risk would be to believe oneself handicapped, embarrassed, uncomfortable. One is quick to think that sensitivity is a defect. Whereas the heart is, in reality, of infinite power...
In the end, it is only a question of tuning fork. Of adjustment. Every time I feel what the other feels, am I still in my house or have I fled so far away that I have lost the keys ? Have I deserted my walls to the point of believing that those of others are mine ? Then I believe I am lost, without a home, without walls and I blame the whole world...
Fear is not finding one's "home" anymore.
But it is an illusion ! Because it is impossible to be outside of oneself. Impossible to be threatened because "home" is always there, when you want it. When you know how to connect to it.
This is the art of the true virtuoso of life. The modern day samurai.
WHO IS THE OTHER ?
A man once asked the wise man how best to behave with the Other. He answered : "There is no other".
Where, then, would be the threat ?
While taking the train a few days ago, a man had played his music much too loudly from his cell phone. I cried him out that he could turn it down or use headphones. Looking surprised, having searched without finding a way to lower the sound of this music that was playing and disturbing the airwaves, he looks at me first annoyed. Then he is silent. And finally he says to me : "Let's make peace". From this simple word, on the surface, my depth was shaken. The journey then became a sharing of smiles and laughter !
There are those exits from a score that one would never imagine. Peace in the middle of a battlefield, love at the bottom of the well. Freedom beyond a (false) door...
The heart never deserts. Only we hide it from ourselves, sometimes.
But to remember our false walls, our daily hypnosis, is to open ourselves to the miracle of Life.
I wish you a wonderful Christmas, filled with the "soul in action" that is in you !
Musically yours,
Hélène Tysman
Photo copyright by ©️Lou