In my workshops with music teachers, I now emphasize the presence of uncertainty, and how our strategies, advertising, and studio policies need to be agile enough so that they can embrace a wide variety of outcomes by the fall when the next teaching year begins.
Mark Lilla describes the situation well in his NYT opinion piece::
At some level, people must be thinking that the more they learn about what is predetermined, the more control they will have. This is an illusion. Human beings want to feel that they are on a power walk into the future, when in fact we are always just tapping our canes on the pavement in the fog.
A dose of humility would do us good in the present moment. It might also help reconcile us to the radical uncertainty in which we are always living. Let us retire our prophets and augurs. And let us stop asking health specialists and public officials for confident projections they are in no position to make — and stop being disappointed when the ones we force out of them turn out to be wrong.
We can’t see into the future, but setting up our strategies now will increase our ability to react to how things might change.
(Image by Suliane Ferraz on Unsplash)