Dance Advice | Dance FAQ’s | You Are Not Your Talent
You Are Not Your Talent
Beethoven, for me, was probably the greatest composer of all time. His piano sonatas are incredible. In fact, they are beyond that for me (and millions of others around the world). However, Beethoven was not his compositions. He was not his piano or his playing of that piano. He was not his music. It was the ‘original nature’ at his core. Ludwig Van Beethoven was a human being with incredible ability that changed the world but that life-changing ability was only a manifestation of his talent. It was a side to him and his abilities. He certainly wasn’t particularly happy and was even arrested and put in jail for being drunk and disorderly on more than one occasion. So what is this thing that we have to identify our talent with who we are? If we locked Beethoven in a room with just a piano from birth to death, do you really think he would have been happy and fulfilling his true meaning on this earth? To just compose music? This would be a tragedy. He himself longed for love and peace in his life, as do most of the great composers and artists. A certain disgraced pop musician often talked about being his true self on the stage and said that he could ‘live and sleep’ on stage. Have you ever heard anything so narcissistic in your life before? Look what happened to him… it’s a cautionary tale of self mutilation, self-loathing and child abuse. So if you desire to be ‘one’ with your talent and identify so profoundly with it, be aware that you may pay the price in the areas that really matter in your life. Even if you do so, ‘real life’ will catch up to you in the end and you won’t have fulfilling relationships, love or equilibrium because that energy will have been focussed on your creative outlet. So while your talent is a part of you, if you identify yourself as your talent it will soon become your prison. That kind of self-imposed bondage is absolutely the antithesis of artistic and creative expression, which should always be free and joyful. It’s important to realise that your talent is an ability you have, which is one of many abilities you have but it is not who you are at root. This is basic stuff and it’s been propagated since the dawn of time. Even Gautama Buddha said that ‘The root of suffering is attachment’. Another really important thing to remember is that if Beethoven’s hands were chopped off in an accident, then his piano playing days would have ended that very moment. He was such a genius that he could have continued to compose, like he did when he was deaf but if he would have been so strongly identified with his piano playing and then have lost the physiological ability to actually play, then that would essentially be the end of his existence, certainly his psychological well-being and possibly even his life. Similarly, if an athlete dedicates their whole life and strongly intertwines their identity with their sporting ability, then at the first sign of physical incapability their personality would inevitably also unravel. It is certainly possible to achieve, live healthily and realise that your talent is a manifestation of your abilities but not the ‘be all and end all’. Even if you believe this to be the case, life will show you otherwise at some point along the way. This means that not only is it unhealthy to identify with your talents, but it is futile. Ironically, when you accept this your artistic and creative energy will be free to really express itself and make an impact on the world, without your own imposed fears and psychological restrictions. Creative and artistic energy needs to be free to flow to its maximum potential.