At sea, you can’t tell how far you’ve come. There’s only the horizon—and it’s always just out of reach.

I had coffee with a master musician yesterday. I'm rare to dole out compliments, but this man has achieved some of the highest technical and musical heights in Indian classical music. Mad respect.

Our conversation ranged widely—from Bay Area life to motorcycles to the grind of being a professional musician. I shared the dream of being "full time" with music, not needing another vocation but focusing only on craft and sharing.

He challenged me with the metaphor: a horizon lost at sea. With no landmarks, we can't tell how far we've gone nor how close we are to a destination. No matter how good we get, there is no getting there — there is always a horizon. That quiet ache—‘if only I could practice more’—never really fades. Even mastery hums with a sense of almost.

Even Nikhil Banerjee, arguably one of the best musicians who ever lived, said in an interview a year before he died: he was so close to achieving something great, he only needed to continue practicing.

The invitation, then, is to treat the whole thing as a living meditation—to find ease in the unease, to play even as we search.

Maybe that’s the real art: falling in love with the practice itself, not where it takes you.