Break on Through

This weekend is full of piano practice, as Smallsteps will be in a recital for her music school. It is a shared recital, so they will be playing together, and they seem to have grouped them based on when they started practice, not their skill level. This is the first time Smallsteps has had to play like this, and she quickly realized how hard it is to concentrate, when the person next to her is playing the wrong keys, at the wrong speed.

Tomorrow, she will practice encore and then there will be the concert, ad she is nervous, as there will be hundreds of people on the audience. What I tried to explain is that as long as she concentrates on what she is playing, the keys in front of her, there is no difference when playing by herself, or in front of 1000 people.

It is a hard lesson to learn and apply though, because we are easily distracted by what is outside of our control. But, if we are able to focus on the job at hand, those keys, our actions, behaviours, the things that we can influence - we are able to overcome a lot of the challenges we face.

I never learned this lesson as a child.

But, I still remember the feeling of being in the zone when playing sports. At that point on the field, it was like my senses narrowed and I could only see, hear and feel what was necessary for me to perform. It was like my body selected for relevancy, ad filtered out anything that was not useful.

Flow is a great way to experience life.

Of course, it is also a exclusionary way to live. How much would we miss if we could just exclude what we didn't want at the time, but not knowing what we actually need, or what will arise that will change our needs. The ability to filter in new information from our periphery means that we can adapt to a changing and dynamic environment. We need to learn to be selective, and also be open to new things we didn't select or expect.

I feel that these days, children are able to concentrate on "what they want" as long as it is something fun that they want to do, the way they want to do it. However, if it lays outside of this, they aren't able to concentrate much at all. For instance today at times, there were thirty kids of varying ages in a room sitting at ten pianos. And while the instructions were being told, there was quite a range of behaviors, with some like Smallsteps trying to listen, and others unable to stop themselves from hitting the keys. And, I will go out on a limb and suggest that the kids in this room, are probably at one end of the "good kid" spectrum, looking from the perspective of learning.

So much of our world today is curated or curatable, so we are able to pick and choose what we watch, when we want to watch it. I think that this means that we are less comfortable when things we don't want to experience or things that are unexpected enter into our environment. As a result, perhaps this is part of the reason why so many today are a bit more fragile, a bit more easily triggered.´

It is interesting watching the behaviors of kids these days, because there are still some of the "old-fashioned" styles, mixed in with the new styles, where for instance, some kids are sitting with their parents and talking during the breaks, and some are sitting on phones and tablets like their parents. We don't really know where this all leads, but once we get there, it will be very hard to turn back.

It is much harder to learn when an adult.

Taraz
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