Tune Your Family Piano if You Want to Be Happy
And you don’t even need a piano, just a family!
Did you know that a piano needs to be tuned every 3 months in its first year, then at least twice a year thereafter, unless it is noticeably out of tune?
I didn’t know this. Probably because we don’t have a piano. The closest we have is a tired old keyboard we picked up off Gumtree that we brought out and dusted off at the start of the first lockdown. I thought I’d spend all my extra time (ha!) learning to play it… I learned how to play ‘The Sound of Silence’ REALLY well.
And that was it.
I haven’t touched it for months. Actually that’s not true, I have moved its location in the house twice, in the hope that by putting it somewhere new and surprising, one of us would feel inspired to have a tinkle on its very plastic keys. That hasn’t happened so far but I live in hope.
Weirdly, despite our lack of any real musical ability, there is a piano at the heart of our family. It has been at the core of how I have raised my children for the past twelve years. This ghostly piano is intimately entwined with our family’s happiness, but I am the only one that knows it exists.
How can we measure our happiness? How do we know if we are happy? What does ‘being happy’ even feel like? It’s harder to define than I would have imagined. When I try, the meanings seem to shift and shimmer, to change with the angle of the light or the direction of my gaze.
Happiness is about the small moments, and the life-changing events. It is being present and content in this moment, right now. It is connection with loved ones, with nature, with music and art. It is warmth, and rest and the movement of our body and the touch of snow on a crisp winter night.
It is accepting the here and now for what it is- an adventure, good or bad. It is discovering an activity or new skill that brings joy, and having time to immerse ourselves in it. Nurture it, practise it, use it.
Happiness is a moment of delight or a period of calm, a spark of creativity or a warm touch. It is everything to have ever wished for, and the smallest of needs met.
I feel fortunate to have happiness often. It floats through on little bubbles of contentedness, affection, giving, receiving, laughing, sharing, connecting, playing, reflecting and creating.
But there are times when I feel its absence. There is a loss of happiness, there is an emptiness, a numbness. The piano that we try to play our own personal melodies on is out of tune, and the sounds we produce are jarring to us and those we live with.
When I was growing up, an old family friend used to say that children are like a piano, they need tuning every few months. She had raised four children and took the view that how you treated each child, how they were disciplined, the parenting tools that did or didn’t work with each, needed tweaking often. Each child’s piano needed a retune at least a few times each year.
Somehow the idea of the piano has stuck with me and when I became a mother myself, my ‘family piano’ was born. I started to imagine our new little family unit as a piano. And just like a piano, in that first year we needed to re-tune every 3 months.
One of the biggest surprises of motherhood has been how quickly things can shift from ‘running smoothly’ to ‘no longer working’. Every time we found a little routine that worked for us all, we would settle in and feel smugly content… until it all went pear-shaped again. We thought we had baby’s feeding routine sorted, until the next growth spurt. Baby was happy to get cuddles from absolutely anyone, until they really weren’t, and only mummy cuddles would do. We thought we had sleeping through sussed, until we hadn’t. Our little parenting wins, the tricks and techniques that had been working so well, lasted only so long before we were thrown another curveball.
As our children have grown, the surprises have become less frequent. But we still get caught out often. We get lulled into a sense of security by the ease of a new routine, by family rules that seem to be working for everyone. We find a rhythm that seems to meet all of our needs. We stay there, we try to hold on to it because it has worked so far and we assume it will continue to do so. We get into a groove of being, but then we look up and find that we are actually stuck in a rut.
Each of us in our family of four plays our own unique tune on our family piano. It might be jazz, or the blues, a beautiful symphony or just simple scales. Sometimes we play a tune together, sometimes we make music alone. The music is our happiness and there are infinite ways to play it.
But slowly, without us really noticing, the piano strings stretch a little. Or a passing knock causes just the slightest change in tension. And before we know it our piano, our family’s happiness, is out of tune. Whatever we try to play, together or alone, it just sounds off. It is time to tune our piano.
So every 6 months or so I find myself as piano tuner. I look at each musician in my family and I ask ‘Which of the keys that you need in order to play your beautiful music are out of tune?’ I find those keys and I tweak them until the music plays true again.
This might be as simple as changing what we are eating, or the time we all choose to go to bed. It might be that we need to spend more time as a family, or allow for more time spent alone. We might need to find different hobbies, spend more time outside or create more. It is about how we each spend our time and the connections between us.
Sometimes there are big changes. It might be that there are many out of tune keys, there might be lots of work to do to regain the exquisite music that we lost. Or it might be that small knocks come in a relentless tide, such as in this past year. These little knocks might change just one key at a time, but each time we need to spend a few moments to retune it.
I have learnt that whatever is thrown at us, we can keep our family piano in tune if we just tackle one key at a time. Tiny steps. A twist here, a tug there, and we will soon hear our harmonies flowing true again.
