The older I get, the more important cat-cow and cobra seem to be. Squats too. Balance, flexibility the body’s way of reminding you it still wants to participate. When I was a teenager, I read something by Lao-Tzu that never left me. He described a leaf on the ground crumpled, brittle, drained of color and compared it to one still on the branch, supple and green. His simple conclusion: rigidity, sign of death; flexibility, sign of life. I think about it at the piano now. The new pieces aren’t about mastery or even beauty. They’re exercises in staying pliant, bending toward whatever happens next. Each a small negotiation with gravity, proof something inside still moves. The older I get, the more the body and the music seem to be practicing the same thing: the art of not breaking.