if life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

so i was procrastinating again, after i came home from lunch with val at fish and co - well i still am now.
she was sweet..she gave me a birthday treat :)
and anyways...you basically don't have much to do when you're procrastinating right?
yes. i'm too lazy to pack.

was going through my shelf and looking at old stuff when i came across my hymn book :)
i loved this story in there and i have no idea how many times i've read it.
some sacians probably never saw it in the hymn book.
it's really really nice. i'll put it up :)


On Nov 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a concert at the Avery Fisher Hall at Lincon Center in New York City.

If you've ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage was no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly, is an awesome sight.

He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot forward. Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.

By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly while he makes his way across the stage to his chair. They remain reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs. They wait until he is ready to play.

But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap - it went off like a gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do.

We figured that he would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and limp his way off stage - to either find another violin or else find another string for this one. But he didn't. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyesand then signalled the conductor to begin again.

The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had never heard before.

Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. Iknow that, you know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refuse to know that.

You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the string to get new sounds from them that they had never made before.

When he had finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appriciated what he had done.

He smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said - not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone - "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left."

Perhaps that is the definition of life - not just for artists, but for all of us. Here's a man who has prepared all his life to make music on four strings, who, all of a sudden, in the middle of a concert, finds himself with only three strings; so he makes music with three strings, and the music he made that night was more beautiful, more sacred, more memorable, than any that he had ever made before, when he had four strings.

So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering world in which we live, is to make music; at first with all that we have, and then when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have left.


You've got to sing like you don't need the money.
Love like you'll never get hurt.
You've got to dance like nobody's watching.
You've got to come form the heart if you want it to work.