I was perusing Facebook the other day and watched a video of four people playing the same piano.  They all took turns turning the pages and smiling, eight hands roaming up and down the keys as they pounded out the piece they were playing.  I liked the music and pictured the same piece being played on four different pianos by the same four people.  It would have sounded the same but would not have been as fun to watch.

What I noticed more than everything else I was watching was that they all did that thing piano players do, you know…rocking back and forth to the music as they changed tempo and raised and lowered sound of the keys from soft to loud and back to soft.  All piano players do it…as I have observed.  I am not a player so I can’t say that I do it but I notice things like that.

It started me thinking.  I could start imagining myself sitting at the keyboard of my laptop rocking back and forth as I pounded out my blog or a story or a chapter in a book.  I could imagine writing faster and slower, changing tempo as the thoughts rolled out of my head and to my hands; pounding now and lightly tapping then.  I wondered how that would look to the casual observer.  I wondered if getting so into my writing would cause me to do the same so I sat down and started writing.  My first words were tentative and as the thoughts began to flow my typing got faster and faster and mistakes were backspaced and corrected quickly then the thought would end and everything would slow until the next thought was born.  Two hundred words, three hundred words…five hundred words and so on until the piece was completed.

Funny thing is, I never once swayed forward or backward.  I didn’t lower my head and listen the tapping as I created each sentence.  The speed varied on the thought but that was about it.  My typing as always been a bit like listening to a DI walk across the room…rather loud as each heel strikes the ground as the DI pounds each step into the floor.  Yes, I walk the same way as I type…just a bit intense.  I have had to paint the letters back on the keyboard I use for my tablet twice now.  Still, no swaying to the words the same way that a pianist sways to the music that is being played.

I would stop every now and again to look back over my work. Piano players, I noticed, don’t do that.  When I didn’t like the way a sentence ended or didn’t like the way one thought flowed into the next I took the time to fix it.  Again, piano players don’t get that luxury.  Once the music is sounded it is out there and once a mistake is made the best you can do is try to cover it up with the next note or change the piece altogether and then let everyone think that you meant for it to sound that way.

These are just the things I was thinking today.  All I can say about that is piano players are not typist when they are playing and typist are not piano players when they are typing.  I think that even if I did play the piano I would not sway to they typing like I would sway to the music….