Fair warning: I am about to split a hair to make a point. It is true, splitting hairs is a past time not a few find tiresome, but considering a point is a definite space of no dimensions, I would say that a split hair is entirely too generous for the task.
Alas, it must suffice.
Speaking of tiresome things, allow me to point to the point that will point to my point. I have a general sense, as a teacher, that many people have an intuitive understanding that playing an instrument is not easy. This may seem a small thing to be irked by. And it is. But it is not the mindset that I find irksome, it is the conclusion towards which such a mindset inevitably leads.
The problem is this. Saying “Playing an instrument is not easy,” really amounts to saying almost nothing at all. Because, for sure, you have said what it is not, but neither have you said what it is. I could say, for instance, “Playing an instrument is not easy, but... it's not that difficult, either.” Such a statement is a perfectly valid statement. Hence the hair. Assuming something is “not easy” is not the same as assuming something is “difficult.”
If I return to my previous statement, now with my updated assumption, I can say “Playing an instrument is difficult, but,” but I cannot follow that but with “...it's not difficult.” I mean, I can. “It's difficult but not difficult.” There, I did it! Hooray me! If you wish to stop here, I wish you the best, but I don't have high hopes for your future prospects.
For the people who continue on because they are not satisfied by statements of utter nonsense, compare “It's difficult” to “It's not easy, but it's not difficult,” and you can see how framing the problem in the positive (it is this) as opposed to the negative (it is not that) makes for a statement rather more clear.
“So what?” cries the, I must imagine, increasingly exasperated reader, who has not yet grasped my true point because I have not yet pointed it out. “So it's difficult and not not easy. No need to be pedantic. I know what you mean!” But that, there, is precisely the point. You do not know what I mean, because if you did, you'd understand why I, as a teacher, find a student who assumes learning an instrument is merely “not easy” far more difficult to teach than a student who assumes that learning an instrument is, in fact, immensely difficult.
For you see, or are about to see after I tell you, that a student who begins with “It's not easy” can slip, with great ease, into the territory of “but it can't be that difficult.” And as soon as they make that step, and they almost all do, they have started down the path which ends with the instrument being almost impossible rather than simply difficult. Because if “it can't be that difficult,” then that means it won't take that much effort, which means I don't need to practice how my teacher says I need to practice, so I won't because what my teacher is suggesting is to put lots of effort into something which, while not easy, is surely not so difficult as to require the kind of effort my teacher is requesting of me.
That logic may sound so convoluted as to be unlikely, but it happens every time. Every. Time. To illustrate, this is a summation of every teacher-student conversation ever after the student comes to the above conclusion:
“Student, did you practice your scales?”
“Yes.”
“Good, then this shouldn't take too long. Play a D major scale for me.”
“I'd really rather not. Lets play Beethoven, instead.”
“-.-”
“Ugh. Fine.” *student fails to play a D Major scale*
“Oh. Ok. Sure. Uhm. Look at this piece by Beethoven. What is its theme?”
*student shuffles uncomfortably*
“It's a SCALE. How can you play this piece by Beethoven, which is infinitely more difficult than playing a scale, if you can't play a scaaaaaaaaale?”
And then you waste an entire lesson going over D Major again because they didn't think it was that important, and they didn't think it was important because their mindset led them to believe it was not important. Because it's not easy, but it's not hard. It's just something in between. So lets cut out all the boring stuff and short cut ahead to Magical Christmas Land where everybody only eats cake and never gets diabetes and vegetables are regularly assembled to do all your math homework.
Unfortunately for them, and every teacher who teaches them, learning to play a musical instrument is not “of middling difficulty.” It is “of excruciating difficulty.” The human brain being what it is (that is to say, both lazy and full of its own self importance), anything “of excruciating difficulty” is rather inconvenient to its notion of preconceived greatness. Also, anything “of excruciating difficulty” represents a rather uncomfortable amount of work. So I sympathize. Anything “of excruciating difficulty” represents exactly the anti-thesis of what the human brain is all about.
So the brain shoots itself in its metaphorical foot. Again. Starting from “It's not easy, but it's not hard” may seem to be a better place to start, psychologically speaking, than “It's difficult,” because if it's difficult we may not ever start at all. There is some truth to that, but it comes at the price of great harm to one's future efforts. You wind up making it more difficult on yourself than it is, which is already quite difficult. So how to begin?
Like this.
“It's excruciatingly difficult... but it's also possible.”
Once you reconcile yourself to the difficulty of the task, everything becomes possible. It becomes possible because you realize there are no short cuts, that, in fact, the short cuts take you the long ways around back to where you started. That if you sit down and do the work that is required of this difficult task, it is merely difficult. And once it is merely difficult, it is simply a matter of doing what needs to be done, and nothing more.
Start by doing what is necessary. Then do what is possible. And suddenly, you are doing the impossible.
--- St. Francis of Assisi
No comments:
Post a Comment