I’m currently reading Alan Rusbridger’s Play It Again : An Amateur Against the Impossible. It’s about his attempt as an amateur pianist to tackle Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G Minor — one of the most impressively challenging pieces in the canon.

I’ve been quasi-obsessed with Chopin’s Ballades for a long time, and while I’ll grudgingly admit that No. 4 is the superior of the four, No. 1 will always be my favorite. And I love it for the reason all who play it love at and fear it: the terrifying coda, marked Presto con fuoco. For non-Italian speakers or people who never to music lessons to learn all those Italian terms:

• Presto: “very fast”
• Con fuoco: “with fire”

To say it’s impressive is an understatement.

Those leaps the left hand has to make; those whatever-the-hell-they-are right hand furies starting at bar 216 (Garrick Ohlsson calls them “wiggles” — if only); that double scale separated not by an octave but by a tenth at bar 255. How can anyone do that?

I took enough piano that I can follow the score and point to where the music is (in other words, I could turn the pages for someone playing this), and that means I know just enough about piano to realize how impossible this piece is. And yet people learn it all the time. “I played it when I was 17 and…” one person explained in a video. “It’s devilishly tricky,” a professional might say. No — it’s impossible. How anyone does it is beyond me.

Alan Rusbridger accomplished it (or least I’m assuming he did — he wrote the book about the attempt) while serving as the editor of the Guardian, which, according to Rusbridger, was publishing around 200,000 words a day when he was working on the Ballade. He was working 60-80 hours a week, coordinating the WikiLeaks articles, getting 60-80 emails an hour by his own estimation, staying up until the wee-hours several nights a week — and somehow he found the time to tackle this ridiculously challenging piece.

In short, Rusbridger’s accomplishment leads us to wonder what we do with our own little spare bits of time here and there. To be able even to stumble through the Ballade would require the average amateur hours upon hours of practice. Where do we get those hours?

I spent some of my free time tonight reading Rusbridger’s book, for example; I’m spending time now writing this. K has started tinkering on the piano, using L’s old books. The Boy — we have to pull him off Fortnight. The Girl — reading, phone, movies, chatting/texting with friends. But the amount of time most of us in the West waste is astonishing. The only thing we can’t get back, and we waste so much of it.