Do you ever have this feeling of accelerando – like the music of your life is being played just a little too fast for your fingers to keep up?  It’s not that you can’t play through this passage of melody – but you just wish you could slow it down, and practice a little more.  Then you could take your seat in the orchestra for another performance – a better, more polished performance, where your skill meets the demands of the score, and liberate its potential beauty for one fleeting, forever moment.  In fact, you are focussed on this reverie even as you stumble and twist your way across the strings and keys of today’s movement.

But it is not to be – not ever, ever going to be.  You will never be any better prepared for today (or god help you, tomorrow) than you are right now.  And I suppose that means we may as well relax.  “Do not fear mistakes – there are none,”  Miles Davis said.  And I suppose what he meant was not merely be brave, but play –  because we are always only playing, and the music is moving on.