No Glimmer of Knowledge Wasted
MAY 2026This time of year has me thinking about change, growth, and new horizons. The culmination of another school year, moving-up ceremonies, and friends announcing new jobs.
“Every recital is a milestone,” I wrote to my studio families last week (for teachers, too, I didn’t say).
There’s an unspoken acknowledgment in this: Chapters ending and beginning, grappling with ambiguity, hope, and the ache of uncertainty.
In their book, The Upside of Uncertainty, Nathan Furr and Susannah Harmon Furr describe this as the doorway to possibility:
“Using the metaphor of a house, you can’t walk straight from the entrance to the tenth room. Rather, you reach new rooms by walking through each room successively, with each new room revealing new doors or new possibilities.”
Some possibilities are readily apparent. Others require a bit more creativity to discover, like a hidden door in a paneled wall. The authors call these “adjacent possibles”—connections waiting to be made.
It’s like Jeremy Denk studying chemistry and English alongside music. Today, he’s the author of numerous essays and reviews in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among others, and a NYT-bestselling memoir. He integrates scientific thinking into his music career by taking an analytical approach to musical analysis and performance, focusing on experimentation, and treating his practice like a chemistry lab.
A few adjacent possibles that have captured my attention recently that I’d like to explore further:
The history of Roman architecture
Poetry writing
German Lieder (especially Schubert and Wolf)
Pastry-making
Art history (especially Post-Impressionism and Fauvism)
There’s no apparent connection between these things—and that’s the point. Often, you won’t know what knowledge or skills can be applied elsewhere until you experience them. Maybe it helps you develop your creativity, maybe it informs your teaching or music work, maybe it’s learning for the sake of learning, or maybe it’s something you do for leisure.
One of my favorite quotes about this is from Keith Sawyer’s book, Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity: “The wonderful beauty of the creative life is that no authentic, thoughtful experience, no new glimmer of knowledge, is ever wasted.”
Here’s to the glimmers and possibilities that await.
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