Years ago, I worked with one of my best friends as a contract teacher at a music school.

She taught violin, and I taught piano, guitar, and singing.

The nature of being a contract music teacher is that your schedule and income are shifting frequently. In general, the times directly after school fill up fast and then you get older students coming after dinner. Once you’re pretty well established, you can have a solid schedule with no gaps, from 3:00 PM until 7:00 or even 8:00 PM each weekday, and more on the weekends.

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Every day, I wake up and look at the coronavirus statistics reported by The New York Times, trying to make the number of new cases decrease with the power of my mind.

Y’all, I’m so sorry — for the most part, it doesn’t seem to be working. At least, it’s not happening as fast as I would like it to.

I’m frustratingly powerless. The recent mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder emphasize the scope of this lack of influence. All I can do is what I can do in my own little life. And even that is not going the way I planned.

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When I taught piano lessons, I worked with a little girl named Catherine. Honestly, I’ve worked with so many Catherines over the years that I’m not even going to bother to change her name for this story.

Catherine took to the piano easily. She was talented in the most basic and obvious way: on day one, it was as though she already a few months of experience based on her knowledge and execution. Not only could she play whatever I asked her to play, she did it with grace and ease.

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Years ago, I was teaching music lessons six days a week and managing my music school on top of that.

I like to be busy, but I was starting to get tired. To my surprise, the thing I was getting tired of was not the bookkeeping and appointment setting and other mundane tasks. It was teaching the music lessons.

I found myself with less patience and more resignation. The energy I usually put into problem-solving, digging deep and going beyond the minimum to find just the right approach for a given student — it just wasn’t there.

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What would you do, if only you had permission?

Who do you need it from?

Can you give it to yourself?

Yes, you may hire someone to clean your house.

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