morning light drifts in
hands clumsy with the first notes
silence hums along
If you ask me what skill I’d like to learn, I could give you a tidy answer—piano, sewing, maybe gardening—but the truth is less clean. The skill I want has less to do with the surface of things and more with the undercurrent. It’s about patience, about returning, about staying inside the rhythm of something until it reveals what it was always trying to say.
Still, it helps to begin with the tangible.
The Piano in the Station
There is a piano in the Zürich train station. It stands near the corner where light falls from the high glass ceiling, a little scuffed, always slightly out of tune. Anyone can sit and play. Sometimes it’s children banging with sticky hands, sometimes a man in a suit loosening his tie, sometimes an old woman whose fingers move like moths across the keys.
I often stop to watch. The station clock above performs its ritual pause at the 59th second, and while time hesitates, someone plays a fragment of Chopin or a pop song that refuses to die. People walk past without looking, dragging luggage, balancing coffee, whispering into phones. But every so often, one person slows down, caught by a phrase, and stands very still.
If I could learn a skill, I would learn to play the piano like that—not to entertain, not to perform, but to drop a stone into the current of the day and watch the ripples move outward. To sit down at a public piano with nothing planned, press one key, then another, until a small truth appears.
But I know myself. My fingers would stumble. My rhythm would betray me. I would hear the wrong notes echo too loudly. And yet—if I stayed, if I returned, if I practiced long enough—the wrongness would turn into honesty. That’s what practice really is: living with wrong notes until they become familiar enough to guide you somewhere else.
What I want to learn is not piano exactly. It is the willingness to stay with a sound until it teaches me.
The Jacket with Scars
In a small shop in Ljubljana, I once saw a jacket with a torn elbow. The owner had repaired it with red thread, deliberately visible, stitches wide enough to look almost careless. It looked like a wound that had chosen to heal loudly.
I asked about it. The shopkeeper shrugged and said, “Better than throwing away. Clothes should carry their history.”
That sentence followed me out the door. Clothes should carry their history. I thought of all the shirts I had abandoned at the first rip, the sweaters I’d left in donation bins with loose cuffs, the jeans gone thin at the knees. What if instead of discarding, I had learned the language of repair?
If I could learn a skill, I would learn to mend properly. To sit at the end of the day with a needle and thread while the kettle hums. To give a garment another chapter. To see a scar not as failure but as character.
But more than stitches, what I want is the patience behind them. The willingness to slow down, to care for what is already mine instead of reaching for something new.
The Garden That Refused to Hurry
A few years ago, I tried planting tomatoes on a balcony in Bern. I bought soil, pots, seeds. I watered, adjusted for sun, read online advice. Days passed. Then weeks. Nothing. The pots looked back at me with the same blank face.
One morning, when I had almost given up, I found a thin green thread poking from the soil, fragile and ordinary. I remember laughing out loud, surprised at how much joy a stem no longer than my fingernail could bring.
The tomatoes grew crooked. Some split open. Some never ripened. But I learned that growth has its own tempo, and impatience doesn’t make the stem push faster toward the sky.
If I could learn a skill, it would be gardening, yes—but more than that, it would be the ability to live inside a rhythm I do not control. To accept that nothing unfolds on my schedule.
The Deeper Skill
Piano keys, mended clothes, a garden row—these are just doorways. The deeper skill I want is patience. The patience to show up again, and again, and again, even when the result hides itself. The patience to live with questions that stretch across years. The patience to let silence be silence until it decides to speak.
I think patience is the parent of all other skills. Without it, nothing survives the long middle—the hours when progress is invisible, when boredom sharpens its teeth, when doubt starts whispering that you should quit.
The skill I want is to stay. To stay when the melody falters. To stay when the needle slips. To stay when the soil refuses. To stay until the silence opens.
The Places That Taught Me
Once, in a laundromat in Lisbon, I heard a man humming to himself while folding towels. Same three notes, over and over. It wasn’t a song I recognized. Maybe it wasn’t a song at all. But as the washers spun and the fluorescent lights flickered, the notes turned the room into something else. Ordinary things do that when repeated with care.
In Nagasaki, I saw a craftsman carving a mask. His hand moved so slowly I thought he wasn’t working. But when I blinked, the curve of the cheekbone had changed, subtle as a breath. Hours later, I realized he had never once checked a clock.
In Berlin, a woman at a flea market sold spoons she had carved herself. Each one slightly different, each one flawed in its own direction. She told me she carved when she couldn’t sleep. “The wood teaches you what it wants,” she said, as if the spoons were her teachers and she was only translating.
What It Would Mean
If I learned the piano, I would sit in the station and play until one stranger paused. If I learned to mend, I would wear my jacket with red thread at the elbow and not apologize. If I learned gardening, I would measure progress in leaves and failures and the taste of one imperfect tomato.
But really, what I want is to learn the kind of patience that keeps me there, in the middle of it, when nothing yet looks like success.
That is the skill I would like to learn: the art of staying.
TL;DR
If you asked me what skill I’d like to learn, I might say piano, or mending clothes, or gardening. But really, what I want is patience—the patience to stay, to return, to keep showing up until the silence teaches me something.
Because the real skill is not in the hands. It’s in the waiting.
life 
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