Hello. This is Yukihiro Shima of Oubaitori.com. Right after finishing today’s YouTube Live, I felt like sharing a little bonus story — something I have been keeping quietly to myself for the past few days. It is about a challenge I just started this summer, twenty years in the making.
“Impossible.” — And twenty years passed
About twenty years ago, a song called “If Only I Could Play Piano” moved something in me, and I thought: what if I actually tried? I found a music school and quietly asked the principal whether it would be possible for someone my age to start. The answer came back in one word: “Impossible.” He told me that unless you begin at around age three, there is simply no catching up.
But what I had in mind was never anything grand. I was not dreaming of playing classical pieces with both hands, or performing on a stage. I just wanted to memorize one or two songs and be able to play them naturally — that was all. Yet that single word cut the dream off completely. For twenty years, a piano was something that belonged to other people’s lives, not mine.
Twenty years later — I finally started
Several things have converged this summer — circumstances I am not fully ready to share yet, but which are carrying me toward a new stage in my life. As I thought about what it would take to prepare for that stage, the piano came to mind again. Three days ago, I sat down at an electronic keyboard and began.
Looking back at everything that has lasted in my life — Daimoku, this YouTube channel, the disciplines I have kept — each one had some kind of structure behind it. A lesson to show up to. A camera to speak to. A specific time to sit and chant. Without that kind of anchor, “I’ll do it” can quietly drift into “well, maybe not today…” Knowing this, my first step with the piano was not the music itself — it was building the habit.
A coincidence at Coach & Four, Tsukuba
Last Wednesday, my wife and I visited Coach & Four, a large bookstore in Tsukuba. Once inside, we naturally went our separate ways. I started at one end of the shelves and worked my way through, looking for sheet music with the notes spelled out clearly — something thin, simple, and full of songs I actually knew. I chose one book.
About thirty minutes later, my wife came to find me — and she was holding a book. She had gone straight to the childcare and education section and found a volume there. Two different paths through the same store, and we had each picked out a piano book without saying a word to each other about it. It felt like something quietly pointing us in the same direction.
Playing “Mother” for the grandchildren
My first goal is a song called “Haha” — “Mother” — a well-known Japanese melody. Our grandchildren are coming for the family’s annual summer gathering, and I have one hope: to sit at the keyboard and play even a single bar of that song for them, with everything I have got. If their grandpa suddenly started playing the piano, what kind of faces would they make? Just imagining it fills me with a kind of happy anticipation. Beyond that, I have Okinawan songs in mind — one step at a time.
It is never too late to begin
Someone told me it was impossible. Twenty years went by. And now I am playing. The “impossible” that expert described was the impossible inside his own picture of what piano-playing had to look like — not the impossible inside mine. As long as you are clear about what you actually want, there is no age at which it is too late to begin.
What any lasting practice needs is a structure — something that creates the condition for continuing. Daimoku works this way. This channel works this way. A challenge without a structure rarely survives. This summer, is there something you have been waiting to begin? Let’s Daimoku. Thank you for watching today.
🙏 From Yukihiro Shima — Oubaitori.com
Bloom your own way, at your very best.
Oubaitori.com — Japan’s specialist in Soka Gakkai Buddhist altars
44 years, one specialty (est. 1982). 17,113 Soka Gakkai Buddhist altars delivered to date. Japan’s No.1 in restoring Soka Gakkai altars, 1,500+ restored. Registered trademark: “Butsudan Revolution — Kokū Zushi.” We ship worldwide.
📱 Talk directly with us (LINE)
Comments