When my husband and I moved into our new house four years ago, we were moving from a very small house that was part of our business in the mountains to a nice, roomy house in a neighborhood. When we moved to the mountains, we had too much furniture to fit in the little house; for instance, we had dining room furniture but the house had no dining room. We had to put the furniture that wouldn’t fit in storage. 

When we moved to the bigger house, though, we were able to bring it all out again. It was a little like Christmas or at least meeting up with old friends. But there were some spaces in the new house that needed furniture that we didn’t have, and one of the things we decided we would like to get was a desk, specifically, a desk with pigeon holes for sorting papers and a lid that closed, so we didn’t have to look at those papers all the time.

Pigeonholes are great for organizing papers or mail or stamps or paperclips. They keep everything in their proper place. They keep the right things in, and the wrong things out, which is precisely why they are so damaging to our harp life.

I can hear the screeching of your mental brakes from here. “What? How did we get from a desk to harp playing?” I’ll tell you how. It’s the pigeonholes.

Most of us harpists aren’t aware of the pigeonholing we do with our playing. Our warm-ups, exercises and etudes stay neatly in their respective pigeonholes, as do each of the pieces we’re practicing. We may see the intersections but we don’t exploit them.

We also try to put our learning in those little boxes, labeling our pieces and even ourselves as harpists by a skill level. Who can tell you that you are an intermediate player or an advanced beginner or a beginner advanced player? There isn’t even any clear definition of what any of those terms mean, and no harpist fits completely into any one of them. We all have individual strengths and weaknesses that make our “level” unique to us and no one else.

The worst result of pigeonholing, I think, is that it shuts the door on opportunity. When we choose a label for ourselves as a harpist, we overlook possibilities for growth and for pleasure in our playing. So today, I’d like to reveal to you some opportunities you may be missing. I’d like to show you some different ways to think about your playing and about yourself as a harpist, ones I hope will help you find more joy in your harp journey.

By the way, my husband and I did get our pigeonhole desk, and while the pigeonholes are organized, the smartest thing we did was to get a desk with a lid that we can close. There’s a lot going on in that desk!

Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode: 

• February Seminar
• Become a My Harp Mastery member
• Harpmastery.com

Get involved in the show! Send your questions and suggestions for future podcast episodes to me at [email protected]

LINKS NOT WORKING FOR YOU? FInd all the show resources here: https://www.harpmastery.com/blog/Episode-194