Hello everyone and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind and make you brave.

I'm your host Joy Clarkson and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's assure you it is very true. I'm pretty good at ear training, so I can pick up almost any pop song and play it

with relative ease, and I can slowly but surely plunk my way through some kind of medium-level sheet

music. I like to think that I'm a good enough pianist to play at one of the local music nights

that people often have at pubs here, where everyone joins in and

no one has to be too good, and all you have to be able to do is keep up with the rhythm, play the

right chords, and follow the general dance that everybody else is embarking in with their many

instruments. But if you asked much more of me, if you asked for precision or even perfection,

I would have to disappoint.

I was thinking about this recently while watching one of my friends, who is a classically trained pianist. I watched in awe as his fingers danced away on the keys with a kind of frightening

precision. I thought about the hundreds and hundreds of hours he had spent playing

scales over and over again, the structure and the discipline that went into making him who he was.

As I watched him, I was struck by how free he looked while he played. It was this kind of

exultant release of creative energy. And I thought about how

blocked I feel when I play, because there's this kind of excellence, this kind of beauty, this kind of

release that he has kind of captured in his disciplined fingers that my fumbling fingers cannot access.

And I thought about that. I thought about how my desire for freedom was curtailed by my lack of discipline. We live in a world where freedom is

probably one of the very highest values, especially in the United States. We think of freedom and justice

for all. It's so a part of our values that we wouldn't even stop to question whether or not

freedom was good and important. But I've come in my older years to ask, what is freedom?

What makes us truly free? I've sometimes heard freedom described as not being forced to do

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