“Tuning a piano is about creating harmony out of chaos, and to do that, you’ve got to be comfortable with imperfection.”
It’s a line from a movie called Tuner, which I watched on the flight to India earlier this week, and it got me thinking.
The main character is tuning a piano when the woman he is with listens to one of the keys and tells him it sounds perfect. He explains that the point is not really that one key and that there are eighty-seven others that all have to work together.
It struck a chord with me, pun very much intended, because I can see how much of my life I have spent focused on individual keys. I have tried to be the perfect father, the perfect husband, the perfect employee, the perfect business owner, the perfect leader. I have tried to fix relationships, solve problems, and get things into what I thought was the right place. Much of that came from good intentions. When you care deeply about something, it is easy to convince yourself that your job is to keep tuning whatever sounds wrong.
What I did not always understand was how often I mistook difference for something being out of tune. I also did not understand that some differences are not problems to be solved at all, while others eventually reveal that the music itself has changed.
That seems obvious when we are talking about music. A piano would be useless if all eighty-eight keys sounded alike. The instrument works because each key occupies its own place. Some notes create tension, others resolve it, and some combinations make sense only after the next note arrives. Music gets its depth from contrast, movement, and the relationship between sounds that are different from one another.
Human beings are far less comfortable with that idea once it leaves the piano. We say we value diversity and individuality. Yet the moment another person becomes different in a way that challenges us, inconveniences us, or refuses to fit neatly into our worldview, our affection for difference becomes less certain.
Difference shows up everywhere, from religion, culture, and politics to the far more intimate questions of how someone communicates, what they prioritize, and what they need from us.
I can look back now and see moments when I thought I was trying to create harmony while I was actually trying to tune another person toward me. I wanted conversations to land where I thought they should. I wanted relationships to work according to an idea I carried in my own head. I wanted another person to understand something the way I understood it because, from where I was standing, my interpretation seemed obvious. Sometimes it may even have been reasonable. That still did not make it the only note available.
This instinct scales far beyond our private relationships. Across religion, politics, nationalism, culture, and race, we have an extraordinary ability to turn difference into defect. We say we want people to coexist, yet coexistence often comes with an unspoken condition that they become more familiar to us. Once difference becomes defect, correcting another human being begins to feel justified, even necessary.
That may be one of the great contradictions of our age. We have never talked more enthusiastically about diversity while remaining deeply uncomfortable with what genuine diversity asks of us: living alongside people who vote differently, worship differently, raise children differently, and sometimes hold ideas that make little sense to us. Perhaps that discomfort is part of the music too.
The piano metaphor becomes more useful when we remember that a piano tuner still tunes the piano. Keys drift. Strings stretch. Temperature and humidity change the instrument. Our lives require the same attention. Relationships need repair, people need accountability, businesses sometimes need restructuring, and societies have a responsibility to confront injustice. When someone’s idea of another person’s supposed imperfection becomes justification for humiliating, excluding, dehumanizing, or harming them, we are no longer talking about harmless difference.
The harder work is knowing what we are actually hearing. Is this simply difference? Is this dissonance that needs time? Or has something genuinely drifted far enough out of tune that it needs attention?
I wish I had asked myself those questions more often when I was younger. For years, I carried fairly strong ideas about what it meant to care for the people closest to me: protect them, guide them, solve problems, anticipate pain, help things turn out well. Those instincts often came from love and responsibility, but I have learned how easily caring for someone can become an attempt to tune them. We start responding to who we think they should be, who we remember them being, or who we hope they will become, rather than listening to who they are now.
People change, and relationships change with them. Needs shift. Priorities move. The things that once held two people together may not hold them in quite the same way forever. Sometimes we misunderstand one another because we are still listening for an old note, unaware that the music has changed.
I am learning that caring well for another person may have less to do with knowing the right note and more to do with listening carefully enough to hear what the relationship is asking of us now.
I have had to learn something similar in business as well. There is no perfectly run company because companies are collections of imperfect people making decisions with incomplete information. Strategies fail, good employees leave, markets move, and processes that once created efficiency eventually create friction. For a founder, the temptation is to reach for the tuning wrench whenever reality no longer matches the picture in your head.
I used to spend far more energy on individual keys: why someone was not doing what I expected, why a process was not working, why one part of the company was underperforming. These days I try to listen longer. I ask what is actually preventing us from moving forward, where someone needs coaching, and where I need to get out of the way. I am getting better at hearing the instrument before reaching for the wrench.
That has changed the way I think about my own life as well. For years, I assumed that enough good decisions, enough wisdom, and enough repaired mistakes would eventually bring me to a place where the pieces fit and stayed that way.
Life has taught me otherwise. A piano does not remain in tune simply because it was tuned once. The wood moves, the strings stretch, the temperature changes, and the instrument gets played. We change for the same reason. Relationships change because people change. Businesses change because ambitions and circumstances change. Societies change because each generation inherits a world it did not build.
The need to retune something is not always evidence that we failed. Sometimes it is simply evidence that the instrument has been used.
There will also be dissonance, and some of the most beautiful music depends on it. Families disagree. Friends disappoint one another. Companies go through difficult seasons. A meaningful life contains chapters that make little sense while we are inside them. We are often too quick to assume that an uncomfortable note means the music has gone wrong, when sometimes we need to stay long enough to hear what comes next.
Staying, however, is not always the answer. There are moments when a key really has drifted and needs tuning, and there are moments when two people, two paths, or two versions of a life have changed so much that continuing to force them into harmony does more damage than accepting what has become true. I used to think that if something mattered enough, it could always be repaired with enough effort, patience, or love. I am less certain of that now. Some things need fixing, some need time, and some need to be released from the version of them we keep trying to preserve.
That may be one of the hardest forms of listening because it requires us to hear what is actually there instead of what we wish were there.
I am still learning the difference. I still notice the one key that sounds wrong and feel the instinct to fix, correct, and improve. But I am getting better at pulling my attention away from the isolated note and listening for what the whole instrument is doing. That has made me more comfortable with imperfection, including my own: the wrong turns, the relationships that changed me, the decisions I would make differently now, and the people who refused to become who I expected them to be.
Maybe that is what the other eighty-seven keys have been trying to teach me. There will always be a note that unsettles us, a person who does not fit our expectations, a relationship that changes shape, a season when something we thought was settled drifts again. The instinct to reach for the wrench will always be there because fixing one key feels easier than listening to eighty-eight of them at once.
A life asks more of us. It asks us to know which differences give the music its character, which dissonances need time, which notes need tuning, and which arrangements have changed so fundamentally that we have to let the composition become something new. It asks us to keep listening closely enough to know what needs care, what needs room, and what needs to be let go.
The other eighty-seven remind me that no single key can make the music by itself.
Maybe a life well lived is learning to listen closely enough that, through all the tuning, drifting, dissonance, change, and imperfection, we can still hear the music.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
