A Moment After

My mom would always say of me, “She could be placed in an empty, white-walled room, and be perfectly happy because she’s here,” and she would smile and point to her head. It makes sense, then, that the place where I’m most content isn’t a physical place so much as a mental place.

I can always tell when a performance is going well because I get lost in it. I stop thinking and worrying, and I just do. My fingers flow across piano keys as naturally as breath; my voice swells with the chorus, and I am fluently speaking the language of harmonies. Every ounce of my being is in the music, and I almost feel outside of myself. I feel like more than myself, and connected to everything — to explain this experience in words is strange though, because the “flow state” is such a wordless experience.

The end of a performance that is going well — that final resounding chord — then, the moment right after I’ve lifted my hands from the piano, the moment after the conductor has motioned our end — it is here that I am most content. It is that moment of silence between the music and the applause. It is that echo everyone in the room can feel, even after the literal echoes have died. It is the held breath, the unblinking eyes. It is the calm, the fullness of that moment. It is realising what I have just done, what I have just brought into the world and into myself, that beauty. It is the feeling that something has changed, that we have grown. Perhaps this is what it is to know success.

It is here, in this moment, that I am most content.