After my fitting this past Sunday Mr. Masaru Naruse, a fabric weaver working in Katsuya Ooe’s atelier, wrote the following:

I'll be 72 this summer. I started playing the piano as a child, and now I'm pretty passionate about it. I started out with an electronic piano, but five years ago I bought the upright piano that's in my workshop now.  

I like Beethoven and Chopin. I consider it a blessing to have met Nana, and I've decided to first read the Moonlight Sonata score to the end, and then try to play it at a more leisurely pace before I die. I, too, will continue to move forward.

Once a work of art, such as a painting, passes into private hands, it becomes difficult for the public to see it. In contrast, the good thing about the fashion field is that if someone wears it and goes out into the world, the work can be seen by many people. In that sense, this project [the two gowns for which he is weaving and dyeing fabric] is fresh and wonderful for me as well.

The fabric of the dress in the second half was dyed with images of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, “Appassionata” and “The Tempest.” I was happy to see “The Tempest” on the Carnegie program…. I wish Nana all the best for the future.

The Lightbulb Moment this week is simply this.  We all owe it to ourselves to do and be our very best at every point in our lives, because we never know how what we do, and who we are, will be an inspiration to others. 

Going into the atelier to be fitted for gowns, I could not have known that a man old enough to be my grandfather would find my vocation in life a source of inspiration, any more than I could have known that he has played the piano almost all of his life.

All of us have art in us.  All of us has something we want to express that shows itself in a variety of ways.  Whether is it me at the keyboard, or Mr. Naruse at a loom designing fabric, there is a longing, a desire, a yearning that we all have to make that something live within us.  A desire to find something in our own lives we can share, thereby making the lives of others better. 

Find your something. Work at it, cultivate it, bring it to life.  You never know how what you are doing can inspire the lives of others.