Sometimes, small moments in life blow us away.
This afternoon, I was relaxing alone on a less-than-comfortable couch in my dorm lounge. A stranger walked past me, nodded, and took a seat unassumingly at the grand piano in a shadowy corner of the room.
With no sheet music and no audience (I didn’t count. The Beatles and I were enjoying a private jam session, thanks to my iPhone.), he proceeded to play. I cursed my parents’ frugality silently as the thundering hurricane of emotions unleashed from his instrument pervaded right through my “$6 at TJMax” headphones and blocked out my beloved Beatles.
It only took a couple seconds for me to realize that this was the best piano player I’ve ever had the displeasure of listening to. The piano wasn’t his instrument, no, it was an extension of his fingers, expressing the anger and the peace, the pain and the joy, that he was experiencing inside. Like a hypnotist, his music (if it must be classified as such) grabbed ahold of my attention and never let go. At moments, I found such freedom in the melodies surrounding me that I felt as if I had discovered how a plastic bag must feel when it flies out of a car window onto the freeway.
Before he took his exit as silently as he entered, I broke my reverie to squeak out a quick, “Thank you.”
“No problem.” He glanced at me. “What’s your name?”
“Lauren, your’s?”
Grasping the handle of the door, he replied, “Drew.”
He opened the door and walked out. I never saw Drew again, but I was struck by the potency of those moments in which our little worlds had collided.
It was enough.