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Child’s piano story metaphor for overcoming attachment

Yamaha Disklavier DC3XE3PRO piano

It’s interesting where pianos pop up. Not always literally, but still in places you wouldn’t imagine.

Perhaps your first thought if I told you I’d just read about a piano on Accounting Web would be about the value of some recently discovered, rare grand piano, or advice on how to insure such a beauty.

But no… Jeff Davidson uses the experience he shared with his young daughter when they upgraded her piano to describe attachment and letting go.

“A new year beckons and I harken back to when my daughter was four years old. Her mother and I bought her an old, upright piano. It was a little beat up, a little banged up, and was missing a few keys, but hey, for a 4-year old, it was fine. To our amazement, she played well. At age six, she began piano lessons. The teacher encouraged us that our little girl had a special talent.

Two years later, the piano teacher told us it was time to buy a Grand Piano for Valerie. It would be quite expensive, but she was now winning awards, so it seemed like the right thing to do.

We went to a large piano emporium and Valerie tried all of them! Finally we came to a piano that proved to be “the one.” She loved it and we bought it. We told Valerie that the piano movers were going to take the other piano in trade, but it didn’t register with her. Days before the new one arrived, we cleaned up the old one, and then talked to Valerie about how that piano would be leaving and the new one would be arriving.

The old had been her piano from the age of 4 and she was now 8. In other words, she had been with this piano for half of her life. She broke into a sob – not just a kid crying, but a deep mourning sob, as if she had experienced the death of a parent or a close friend.”

You can read what happened next here.