A lesson in humility......

One of the guys in yeshiva just got a new speaker/ mixer system for his keyboard, and wanting to try it out, he asked me to bring my bass over so that we could play. Now, I know that I'm not good at all on the bass; I've only been learning for a few months, and I told him that I wouldn't be able to help out. Nonetheless, he told me to come over, "it'll be fun", he said.
So, at his behest, I brought it over, and we set up shop. Right away, he starts playing songs that a) I'm not familiar with and b) the style I'm not too fond of. Not to mention that in general I don't particularily like keyboard music......
Anyway, one of my buddies walks in at that point, and sees I'm struggling. He's pretty good at guitar, so he asks me if he can try out the bass. I hand it to him, and he fools around with it for a bit, not doing much better than me. While he's trying it out, a different guy walks in, one who is considerably better at guitar than the first guy, and seeing him struggling, tells him "when your done, I'll show you both how it's played." Now, I know that it was said as a joke, but there seemed to be an element of arrogance peeking through, but I paid no attention to it. Still, the guy takes it, and proceeds to real coax some nice tunes out of it. Although I know and he knows that he wasn't really playing the bass like a bass, but rather like a guitar, the other fellas in the room weren't aware of it, and there were comments along the lines of "dude, he doesn't even play bass, and he sounds better than you!", etc. I hadn't even had a chance to show them what I could do yet, and after about 40 minutes or so, when I got my beloved bass back and was ready to blow out their eyes with some deep grooves, they had already gotten bored with playing and were now fiddling with the mixing system. So essentially what happened was that I'd be going "bowmp bowmp bing!" and they'd be like "dude, hold on a sec..." or "shut up already!" It was all I could do to bite my tongue and not say anything back, because if I had, it would have possibly gotten nasty, and someone's feelings, including my own, would have gotten hurt......
The best I can say is that a few years ago, I probably would have taken the whole episode to heart. But, I know it wasn't personal, and I was just getting my ego deflated a tad.....
Originally posted Friday, 15 July 2005