Practice

I wish I could play the piano. My husband plays for hours, just for fun. Maybe it's that connection between doing math and reading sheet music, or maybe it's that he kept practicing when he was a teenager and beyond. Whatever the reason, he can play pretty much any song for which we have sheet music. My kids play because we have insisted on lessons and insisted on practice. I can play just the couple of ditties I know by heart from my childhood. And my version is with the fingering of someone hunting-and-pecking as if on a typewriter.
 
I could write the whole thing off to lack of discipline in my own childhood, but that really wouldn't be telling the whole story. While it is true that I didn't practice much when I was 10, I suspect that my husband didn't either. He chose to practice in earnest as a teenager and as a grownup, enough so his knowledge both of the score-reading and of the hand positions would be automatic, and that is why he can play now.
 
Aah, practice. We are told that "practice makes perfect," and while that may not be quite true, practice is definitely a step toward accomplishing what we want. It is the way we learn new skills for a new job market. It is how we get past our difficulty introducing ourselves at a network event. And it is how learn to do things we never really knew we should want when we were kids. It's not easy. Much as we might yell at our kids to practice when it comes to doing  so ourselves, we'd rather be chatting or making dinner or checking out the newest app. And that is why, rather than playing the piano, I am still saying "I wish I played the piano."