Are you 100% in tune with yourself?

When your piano is out of tune, you call a piano tuner. She sidles up to your piano and starts tinkering around. You think about all the pianos that she has tuned on your street, in your neighborhood, on the grand stages, and you are awestruck. She removes segments of your piano that you didn’t know came off.

Your piano tuner has a toolbox. The box transforms her into Gepetto, a master craftsman who will bring your piano back to life. In her toolbox, she has a tweezer, felt strips, a tuning hammer, tuning pins, a tuning fork, and some unrecognizable knick-knacks…She holds down each key with a poet’s patience and tilts her head. Her ears are her most important tool. They are the entry point where the sounds will move through her. The connection between the piano tuner and the piano is relational. The piano plays. The piano tuner responds.

The piano tuner is in tune with the sound of the world. She notices the fluctuations of sounds. It seems, in another life, she would be a surgeon, but in this one, she has chosen carved ivory instead of flesh. Sometimes, the piano tuner says something is broken and cannot be fixed. “Time to get a new piano,” she says. Something a surgeon would never say. Hopefully.

“When we attune with others, we allow our own internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another.” (Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., is an internationally acclaimed author, award-winning educator, and child psychiatrist.)

To be attuned is to notice. To be attuned is to respond to the ever-changing world.

Sometimes people, like pianos, are out of tune with the world. Something has caused them to experience disequilibrium. They are having a bad day, got bad news, or lost a job. It disconnects them from the world. They’re distracted, alienated, anxiety-filled and it blinds and deafens them. They might hear a baby cry and feel nothing. A friend, who is clearly angry or agitated, might say to them, “I’m fine” and they believe them. They are out of tune. They do not know how to respond.

But often, this out-of-tune-ness is temporary. As soon as their world or mood aligns, or they get a good night's sleep, they can read the room again. Their antenna was temporarily bent, but not severed.

Then, there is the occasional person who always seems out of tune. They are the bull in the china shop. They are the piano where something is too damaged to replace. They seem to hear nothing except their own thoughts. Unlike the fluidity of attunement, they are static as the sounds of the world continuously shift around them.

I have come to believe that these out-of-tune people are merely misplaced. There is somewhere for them, but they are not there. Perhaps they are out-of- tune at a dinner party but in-tune at a science lab. Or they are out-of-tune in love but in-tune with friendship. It would be lovely if everyone was in tune everywhere, all the time, but that is not the world. That would make us out-of-tune with our idiosyncrasies. That would make us all the same. Though out-of-tune-ness can be jarring, it can be clarifying as well.

The trick is to notice the places where you do not hear the music, the places where your body cannot read the vibrations in the room, and to keep walking. Your journey, like that of the piano tuner, is to find the place where you can hear the sounds of the world in your mind and body and respond accordingly.

“(a)good piano tuner must have knowledge not only of his instrument but of “Physics, Philosophy, and Poetics,” so that Edgar, although he never attended university, reached his twentieth birthday with more education than many who had.” ― Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner