Just Wait

                                                                                                 Sensuous Structures Series

Just Wait

I got up early this morning to make a coffee meeting with a gentleman we’ll be teaming with on a portion of our current project. I elected to take the back way into downtown and cleverly avoided the sheep chute of commuters stuck on all the highways.  

My host was a little bit late and I spent the time reading a real Wall Street Journal cover to cover, ink stained fingers and everything; it’s been a while since I received information this way. I also overheard bits and pieces of a mentor-protégé conversation happening in the next booth. It was refreshing as the older gent with a handlebar moustache was very patient and coached gently. “Good for him”, I thought, “I wonder if the kid understands the “other free gift”  he is receiving now in addition to his omelet?”

Our meeting was brief, to the point and extremely positive.

All the areas of interest I was hoping to cover were met and my host also offered some additional insights that were quite valid and very welcome.  Man, I love working with “professionals”. As I walked out of the lobby into the porte cochere to get my car the valet winked at me and said, “So, how’d the meeting go ?” “Great”, I answered, “really great”.

The current projects we have underway started in 2004 with a number of fits and starts and trips all over the country trying to get them to “launch” (key words “get them” – remember this line for later). They really got firmed up and set in their current framework when we created Saffron Group on Thanksgiving 2008.  Wow, it seems like seven lifetimes have passed since then. As this project has evolved a myriad of seemingly dissimilar elements have been spread out in various tables much like those tiny little puzzle pieces in fancy 5000 piece boxes, except these puzzles are 3 dimensional and tiered in such a way that the final image must be present from all viewing angles and also from the inside out. Think Hologram.

I read an article today about a study that was done that proved that practice in-fact does make perfect. Seriously, A study. With Grants and Funding and researchers with assistants and maybe even a rat or two thrown in (not really). At the end of this study it was found conclusively that those music students who practiced 10,000 hours or more were better players than students who practiced only 5000 hours.   I shake my head.  

Anyway, I am feeling just like I did when I was 6 and completed the “beginning corner” of a new birthday puzzle. After spending hours tediously sifting through the box and looking at each piece, examining it and setting it aside, over and over again there is a big surge of “ah, ha !!” when those first two pieces come together.  Like then, its kind of messy and doesn’t look like much now, but just wait.