Day 23

The beautiful thing that I picked for today is music. I’ve always loved music, especially classical music, but lately I’ve been enjoying it even more than usual. My room was a catastrophic mess this morning due to my recent trip, so I decided to enliven the cleaning up process by listening to a series of trumpet concertos by Handel. Well, there’s music, and then there’s MUSIC—it’s hard to imagine anything more majestic and inspiring than those pieces! One of my new life dreams is to sometime, somewhere, go to a live concert of trumpet concertos, especially those by Handel. I’m pretty sure I’d sit somewhere up in the balcony (trumpets and high places go together), and just cry because of the beauty. =)

Then, during spare moments throughout the day, I’ve been playing a Schubert impromptu that I used to practice many years ago. I marveled at the thrill of skimming over the keys, hearing the music run through its rollicking melody (it’s the impromptu in A flat major, Opus 90—check it out!). It was addictive to surrender myself to the music and let my hands remember the piece over and over. And I marveled at the creative genius of people like Handel and Schubert, to think up such works from their own heads. Surely it’s a testament to the creative genius that God imparted to humankind, that so many thousands of pieces of music, each of them unique, each with its own order and beauty, could originate from a few blobs of grey matter residing under those powdered wigs or unruly hair!