What? No Vivaldi?

Don't get me wrong, I love listening to and playing Vivaldi.  Right now a friend and I are trading, or even bartering, musical knowledge.  I know how to play violin and viola.  She is wonderful on the piano.  We worked out an arrangement where she is teaching some of my children to play piano and I am teaching some of her children to play the violin.

We were talking yesterday and it seems that kids on both sides of the equation might be a little disappointed at how slow things are going... we're still working on holding the violin and bow correctly and learning notes and proper posture at the piano, for example.  They may have been expecting to play Mozart or Vivaldi (or Star Wars themes) after a whole week!  This might be a lesson in patience and perseverance as well.  Emilie wanted to play without the music because she could, but she was forgetting that it wasn't just the first lesson she needed to know.  Violin students are realizing they need to work on holding the violin without getting tired before they can really work on learning big musical numbers.  There are different steps to take to get to bigger and better things.

It struck me that this is how we all are... at least a little bit.  We want to jump right into the good stuff without the preliminaries.  We want to be the soccer star right off without doing the drills.  We want to do the cool multivariable calculus stuff that they do on Numb3rs without learning the algebra.  (what? Not everyone wants to do that?  hmm.)  We want to have the knowledge of the scriptures and the testimonies of the prophets without the study, fasting and prayer.  We want to have a beautiful house without the work cleaning and remodeling or landscaping.  We want to lose the weight without training our bodies.  We want to make perfect bread and bagels without the research and practice and trial and error.  We want to write the number one best seller without hours of revision and review and learning proper grammar and story development.

Heavenly Father tells us in 2 Nephi 28:30, "For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept , here a little and there a little; and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts, and lend an ear unto my counsel, for they shall learn wisdom; for unto him that receiveth I will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have."

This is how we learn, this is how our loving Heavenly Father teaches us.  We learn a little at a time, and when we can handle more, He gives us more.  He knows how we can best grow into our possibilities, a little at a time!

I am learning from my children each and every day, but I learned more about myself by watching these, well, these 14 children yesterday at my house and hearing the different musical lessons played by many little hands (ok, Michael's hands are bigger than mine now, but you know what I mean!).   What am I reaching for that I am not willing to take the intermediate steps necessary?  How can I do better at setting my goals and then making the time to work on them?  I know some of this comes with years of experience, maturity, and lots of trials.  We'll get there.  As long as we know there is always lots for us to learn, we're on the right track.  It's just figuring out what to learn first that might be tricky.