Dear readers, hello! The pace of these posts have slowed over the last month—and since the last two were for subscribers only (specific practice suggestions working with the ideas in the last public post), many of you haven’t heard from me in a while. I hope this finds each of you enjoying summer (or whatever season you’re in) and hungry for some more practice-related food for thought.
What happens when we are off our routines? Does this ever happen in our practicing? Don’t tell me it doesn’t! And when it happens, our playing is different and our practicing is different. Maybe for a while it’s different to the point of, uh, non-existence; and then later, there’s different in the sense of having lost ground, feeling out of shape…. We do get off our routines. What do we do next?
It might depend on whether our routines have changed intentionally or by accident. Travel or vacation or planned, temporary shifts in our work or family commitments: that is one thing. Just waking up one day and realizing we haven’t practiced in three days (or a week—or a year!) is something else! How did that happen? Did we choose it? consciously or unconsciously? Or did life just take over?
We could take this from a time-management angle…. but oh, please, let’s don’t. That sounds way too tedious to me right now. (Or—if I am completely honest with myself—too depressingly insurmountable.) Being off our normal routines raises all kinds of questions. Some are mundane, some are practical, and some, profound. I’m thinking now about that tension, always present in practicing and in all of life, between the unfolding of things over time, and the experience in the present moment, right now. When we explore this, we might find that even an unintended or unwanted departure from our usual practice routines is an incredible gift, or at the very least an opportunity. It leads us to examine our intentions, our expectations, our perfectionism, our judgements, our most stubborn obstacles, and what exactly it is that we love.
Routines, of course = consistent experience over time. Routines result from repetition, as habit grows. And obviously, our habits can be intentional and wholesome (practicing five days a week, say, using all the tools in P&P!), or they can be compulsive, destructive and painful (fill in the blank of your own example. I’ll spare you mine). The process of how the habits develop is probably not so different either way (repetition! Neural pathways becoming entrenched; the basal ganglia doing their job). But what makes routines routine is that we do them again and again, with consistency over time.
And at least with our intentional habits, we tend to place higher value on our progress over time.We do things now for the sake of what we hope we will be able to do in the future. We measure the present relative to the past; we set expectations for the future, and direct our present energy towards that imagined future. All kinds of judgements, “good” and “bad,” arise from this. On a “good day,” it may be I’m getting a lot better at this piece! This feels easier than it did last week (those practice tools really work!)… By next week, I should be able to have this up to speed! On a “bad day,” it’s more along these lines: Why is this taking me so long to figure out? I should’ve memorized this by now… I thought I had that fingering down the other day, but now it’s gotten worse…. What is wrong with me, that I can’t do this yet?
So, if we’ve been away on a road trip (for example) and we haven’t touched the piano in 2 weeks (let’s just say), some things we were working on will naturally have slipped. And if we’re not careful, we can set ourselves up for a lot of inner struggle around that. But it doesn’t have to be this way!
Dear readers, I was away on a road trip. I didn’t practice for 2 weeks. Upon returning to the piano, my fingers have felt like 10 little sausages. Stiff, dry, uncooperative sausages that will barely deign to move at all! Now, depending on where I allow my thoughts to go next, I might be in for it. This is where there is great value in making a virtue of a necessity. The necessity (if I am to enjoy my practicing—and I am determined to do that!) is to get away from measuring my current (lumpy, out-of-shape) playing against how I know my playing to have felt 3 weeks ago (comfortable, easy, free). And if all I know is to think of my practicing unfolding over time, I’m stuck in a certain kind of practice hell. Ugh, why won’t my fingers move? Oh yeah, it’s because they’re sausages now. HowI miss the days of having fingers, even imperfect ones! It’ll probably take me a month to be able to play decently again. Why did I ever go on that road trip? I hate the way this sounds and feels.
But if we can figure out how to step outside of that over time mindset, we can have a completely different experience. Instead of spreading our attention out horizontally across a timeline in our minds, we might go vertically instead: how deeply can we plumb the depths of experiencing this practice moment? Without regard to past or future? Back to my sausage-fingers: first of all, I knew I needed to just play SLOWLY… and if you’ve been reading these pages for a while, you know how I feel about that. So, setting ourselves something to do that is manageable under current circumstances, in this moment, is one part of the trick. Whatever that is! (To try to do anything else is a recipe for struggle, and I don’t want to practice struggling! Do you?) The other part is in the attitude and mindset. It is an intention to just set any and all comparisons on the shelf—or, better, to chuck them out the window. We resist the urge to compare our current playing to either remembered past (how accurate is that, anyway?) or imagined future (and I think we know how accurate that is!). Do we know how to listen without any comparing in our minds? Even if we’re not comparing to how our playing felt & sounded before we left on our trip: comparing against an abstract aural ideal, comparing against a recording we heard? Do we know how to let that go? When we think about it: all that comparing takes up an awful lot of space in there, doesn’t it? What would it be like to truly not compare what we hear to anything?
Maybe we ask, why should we do that? Wouldn’t it probably sound awful, if we just didn’t care how things came out? Okay, stop right there! The tree has fallen in the forest with no one there to hear it. (No, no, not that forest!) When we can find this mindset (which, in my experience, is definitely Not Always), there IS no “awful!” There’s no gorgeous, either. There are just these sounds—without all that judgement (good and bad) that we layer them with, thicker and thicker and thicker, until it’s a preposterous newspaper review of a concert that can’t possibly the same one we heard, though we were sitting in the same hall on the same night! (Remember concert halls, by the way? Also, it’s illustrative of something here, that different people inevitably hear the same performance so differently. Who’s to say what sounds “awful” or “gorgeous” anyway? Whose judgements and comparisons get to “count”? More on that another time!) And one more thing: does refraining from judgement of what we hear really equate to not caring about the playing? Not at all. In fact I think this is the very most loving way we can listen to ourselves. And when our fingers have turned to sausage, that is more true than ever.
As long as we’re in Devil’s Advocate mode, another question: but Rachel, what about that last post? It’s true: in that article, I was writing very much from the over time mindset. And I stand by it, because don’t get me wrong: I love good habits and healthy routines! That article was pointing towards an attitude of real respect for the music that we play; bringing to our pieces the highest standard that we can, cultivating our readiness to approach certain kinds of repertoire…. recognizing when it’s time to get on that train (and when it isn’t—yet). That was a post for times when we are very much in the flow of our routines, feeling their movement and momentum. It was about growth. And in general, as a piano teacher (among teachers, for I know we have many teachers in the Pride & Practicing community), I am very much attuned to growth, to steering, nudging and tracking students’ progress over many years. Of course I want my students to build their skills and understanding over time. The over time mindset is practical, is in alignment with how our brains learn, has tremendous value and integrity—and is not the whole picture.
Consider the fate of public school teachers in America, who are called upon to constantly assess, track and measure. Where standardized testing is held as a rigid yardstick of students’ learning (and teachers’ effectiveness), “teaching to the test” likely replaces all sorts of spontaneity, creativity and magic in the classroom. The orientation that so heavily favors progress-over-time above present-moment experience is at play. And once again, this orientation is not inherently wrong or bad—but it is surely out of balance in many environments. We need the unfolding-over-time; but we also need what we have, right here, right now. Nothing more or less! In the classroom or as we practice. Lumpy or free, full of momentum or out-of-shape—let all that go. Forget the sausage. Just practice.
We’ll have times where our old routines are shaken beyond their breaking points, where we may feel that we have no routines at all. Sometimes we go through major changes, and we can’t know what new routines will or won’t emerge (with our practicing, or anything else). But we are creatures of habit and routine, so…. something will happen. So we just practice, and we don’t judge a single thing. We just feel our hands moving over the keys, and just hear the sounds. We might like it or not—can’t help that, and it doesn’t matter for now. We don’t get caught up in that. We just play.
Can we only love it, only enjoy it if it feels or sounds a certain way? It is even worth doing when it isn’t objectively “perfect,” or doesn’t meet some standard we have demanded of ourselves? Is it still worth doing if someone else can do it “better”? OR….. can we see that our habit of compulsive comparing has become the most debilitating obstacle of all? Isn’t a moment in which routine is broken the perfect moment to step consciously outside of that habit, too? Just practice!
Later, maybe we sit down to think over how things are for us with our practicing now. Maybe we’ll find that our moment of free, unencumbered practicing, compared against nothing, has given rise to a new intention, which may grow into some new routine. Or maybe not! Let’s don’t worry about it. Something will happen, either way. Enjoy the time away from the piano. Enjoy coming back to it, when you do! And let’s don’t waste our precious energy creating problems where, truly, none exist. Happy practicing!
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So good and helpful!