Short Cuts

There is no such thing as a shortcut. Any journey can be made using a variety of routes but just as with the issue of procreation — where a random selection of gametes creates a unique person — the reality you arrive in via one route is not the same as if you had taken a different route. And as in the case of the person, it is hard to imagine things having been any other way. Thus, for example, learning fast and getting a good grade in a test is not a shortcut when compared with engaging with a subject in a leisurely fashion. The journeys are different and even if the same grade is achieved, the result is not the same. The person that you are is made of the journeys you have taken, there is no way to have arrived as this person except by precisely those journeys.

Bill Evans said in 1965:

“I hardly believe I’m as talented as some others. Someone with talent possesses a kind of facility and plays well as early as 16 or 17, much better than I could play myself at that age. I had to practice a lot and spend a lot of time searching and digging before I got anywhere. And because of that, I later became more aware of what I was doing. I wasn’t an imitation. I found myself with a synthesis of the playing of many musicians. From this something came out and I think it’s really mine.”

Any shortcut he might have attempted to take — to catch up with the talented kids — would have resulted in an alternative reality without Bill Evans as we know him.

There are no shortcuts, and no need to look for them.