The Law of Conservation of Meaning

The Law of Conservation of Meaning

Whenever she laughed at my unfunny jokes, butterflies appeared out of the blue and danced. Profusion of flowers, red and yellow and orange, sprouted from the concrete floor, and all my everyday worries escaped my sight. Somewhere between our exchanges of smile, somewhere between her neon-blue polished fingertips and my faded Levi's jeans, the once so abstract ideas like love and happiness were made concrete. I was in love.

I thought of ways to confess my love. After considering the classic, analog method of writing a love letter and the more modern and chic approach of filming a cute YouTube video, I settled for something in between and decided to play the piano for her. The beautiful sun-glazed Californian outdoors could wait. I frequented the piano room in my residence building to the point of making friends with Michelle, a student employee at the front desk who handed out keys for the room. Every day, I spent hours figuring out the black-and-white rectangles as I practiced the piece “Chaconne” by Yiruma, a gentle and mellow composition that might remind a person of his or her first love.

Because I had not touched a piano key since elementary school and because I was not blessed with the talent of absolute pitch so common to the music majors, the process took a while. Still, the strenuous process was enjoyable, and if my playing could unlock her heart, it mattered little how difficult it was. But I guess my slow progression did matter after all, because by the time I almost completed mastering the piece, she told me one day, with the biggest smile, that she just made a boyfriend. Forcing a grin, I congratulated her.

Butterflies vanished as quickly as they appeared, flowers withered and sank beneath the pale cement tiles. I returned to the piano cell, playing the unheard notes that lost their direction, the sounds that never traveled. The soft piece designed to be played slowly and gently was ignored of its intention when my fingers rushed through the dotted agenda in reckless fortissimo. Rests ignored, pedals misused and abused. Ah, the absence of meaning.

The chaos did wane eventually but my habitual trips to the piano room had not. I picked up new pieces to learn, and piano became a big part of me. Months have passed since the heartbreak, and I stumbled upon the wrinkled and aged sheet music of Chaconne while cleaning my room. When I took it to the piano room and played it, by the end of the piece, lost in the beauty of its sound, I was struck with a new conclusion that it wasn’t meaningless at all.

It was not meaningless. A book never published, a shot missing the rim, a confession never spoken. How could it have no meaning when it sounds so beautiful? In our lifetime, we are bound to undergo rounds of failures and see expectations being unmet. But meaning is in the middle, not at the end; it’s where we find it to be. Often, we get lost in big ambitions and dismiss the value of process. But true value of dreaming lies in the event of dreaming itself, and no one can take away a dream from the dreamer. Machiavelli was wrong.

And not achieving the original goal does not mean zero achievement. Just as a butterfly’s flap of the wing may contribute to the conception of a hurricane thousand miles away, an effort at one may indirectly achieve another. While I only started piano to pursue love, I happened to rediscover my love for the instrument and now am very thankful of this finding. With this new take at life, a boring general education class does not have to be boring anymore, and the pursuit of love -- or anything really -- does not have to be feared. And yes, I have a lunch date with Michelle tomorrow.