If we hold on to the exceptional—if our children adopt that as their measure of success—most will fail, and almost all of them will feel like failures. There’s freedom in embracing the ordinary: freedom, and possibilities. Because in most things, the exceptional is not really what we want for them anyway. What we want for our children, truly, is engagement. We want their love of the cello to grow, to evolve and endure throughout their lives, whether or not they perform…whether or not they are ever exceptional cellists.
