No love, pride, deep-fried chicken

Sorry about the title, I was just reading the comments on the lyrics blog.

So today I was reading this book, "A Soprano on Her Head" by Louise Ristad, which is a really good book about the removing mental blocks for good performance, for musicians and others. At the end of the book, where the writer's bio is usually found, there was a short blurb that said something like, "Louise Ristad was working on the sequel to this book, at a friend's mountain cabin, when she died at age 50. She was on the lake when a squall overcame her canoe. She died peacefully of hypothermia."

What?!

Anyway, the book has a chapter called "So you were a flop!" She tells a story of one of her students who experienced the pianist's worst fear - she sat in front of the piano, and could not so much as remember the first note of her piece. She eventually started playing, but couldn't find her way, and eventually just had to stop. Ms. Ristad gave her comforting words afterwards, "it wasn't soooooo bad, nobody really noticed, blah blah". A friend of hers walked up to the girl, and put his arm around her, and said, "So you were a flop!" The girl laughed and cried and talked about how awful it had been. When she was honest with herself about having failed, she no longer felt like a failure.

Something started nagging me in the back of my mind when I read this, especially Ms. Ristad's following paragraphs, where she said that music played tentatively, for risk of failure, never sounds good, and life lived without risk is similarly dull and meaningless.

There's an aspect of my life where I'm playing it too safe, but my mind won't focus in on it yet. It's like the fear blocks it off.