All those magical, predestined, and irreplaceable people and places are not really that, not really the answer. Rather, we have to stay with the hunger of the question and from its energy fill the space with our own choices, and then with the new things which will be called forth from us in the unexpected poverty and limitation in which our necessarily imperfect choices necessarily situate us.
Music is a part of life, not separate from it; and life itself is musical with its rhythms, variations of themes, episodes, fugues, counterpoints, consonances and dissonances, cadences, silences, and tonalities. When we listen to music, we are contemplating the very structures and colors that make up our own lives. The music we play mirrors the music we live.