Trying to find a balance, a knowledge, a contentment. Not succeeding. Then I spent some time just standing. I was in a position that became uncomfortable. I let the body make it better. I got balance, knowledge and contentment in my physicality. It is often the best place to start for me. Now I could work on my head...

You can only consciously take in 15 bits of information per second but we are bombarded with about 15 billion. These all have some effect. You can’t possibly process it all, let alone control it, so you might as well let go and trust.

Like when I let go in playing the horn. It happens perfectly. A deeper sense wants the right thing to happen. Or maybe it is a higher intelligence (God...). I don’t really mind which it is.

Perhaps you could do this in your whole life. I feel sure that if you did then all the right things would happen for you. Everything would fall into place. It would feel like luck. (Some people seem to do this naturally.) At the moment I have to get into a particular realm - physical, or playing in an orchestra. Which areas would I like to expand it to? Well,  doing stuff at home is one. My relationships is another. One day I could live the whole of life allowing anything. I expect it would be the same as nirvana.  

Oh, the show? The 8th Così went well. Before the start I thought about how many different things have to go right to play a note on the horn. I have to breath in, then out at just the time my lips are ready to buzz just the right number of cycles per second. I have to have lots of muscles tightened exactly the right amount, and I have to listen to many other players to play in tune and in time - minute adjustments have to happen all the time for this. I have to focus my eyes at the right point of the page and interpret all the dots and lines to mean something, and then know what to do to make that something happen. I have thoughts in my head about my colleagues. I know how important this performance is, how unimportant this note is (or the other way round). I am wondering why someone is falling asleep on the front row, what their life is like. I am thinking about my children, what I will have for supper, what the traffic will be like on the way home, and that I haven’t phoned my brother for a while. (Am I at 15 billion yet?) I can’t possibly control all that, so I’ll just let go and trust. Guess what? I played everything perfectly...

Towards the end of the show I was getting tired. England were playing in the World Cup so I had been rushing out to catch the score in my few minutes off. Not good for focussing. I began to play with less comfort and less certainty of being right. It is easy then to fall into really trying to get it right, which I find doesn’t really work. So instead I just accepted how I was, which I realised was not caring that much how well I played. Bingo. I started playing well, and enjoyed it.