Beginner Mind

Being terrible is actually pretty fun

The two halves of my brain are fairly well connected.

I’ve been playing guitar since I was 4 years old, so that whole corpus callosum thing is very robust. However, Right Hand developed as a percussionist, and Left Hand developed as a melodicist/harmonist, and never the twain had any reason to meet before.

But piano, well. That’s a whole different thing. Both hands are both things. Both hands have to think melodically, harmonically, and percussively, at the same freaking time, while one of them is doing it “in high-heels, backwards.” Sort of. Mirror images that don’t exactly do the same things. I never really thought about it before - although typing is, of course, a “mirror handed” operation, and my fingers seem to be fine spelling the words I’m thinking out of my fingers, sometimes back and forth between both hands, and that is nearly effortless.

And that is the beauty and the pain of playing piano, and so we work on it.

Also, bass clef is bullshit and I am a terrible sight-reader. I figure stuff out and then stop looking at the music unless I have no other choice, and … that’s what got me in so much trouble with my violin teacher … She’d say, “Eyes on the page,” and I’d say, “I know how it goes,” and there would be much consternation, and parents would be told to watch me like a hawk and make sure I was actually reading the music … (I was so bad. I was putting a paperback book inside the music book on my music stand and reading while I was practicing instead of actually looking at the music, but because my mother never walked all the way into the room and looked at what I was looking at, she thought I was reading the music … I may have been playing Vivaldi, but I was reading Tolkien or Le Guin or … )

So yeah, me and formal music education did not get along.

I warned my new and not-yet-long-suffering piano teacher that I would go “off book” swiftly and regularly, and she said, “Good!” Hallelujah! So I am learning the song the way it’s in the “Adult Piano Course for Babbies,” and then I am ignoring the book and doing it like I’d rather.

But even so, it is atrociously unmusical as yet. But that’s okay. My working motto is, “A thing worth doing is worth doing badly until you learn to do it well.” Thanks, Robert Fritz. Permission to stink=granted.

The really interesting thing, though, is this experience of Beginner’s Mind. I’m a professional musician, have been since I was 9 years old. I know what I’m doing, I know how to do the chords and play the things and I can sing while I’m doing it, and all that musiciany stuff. So being absolutely terrible at something musical is as hilarious to me as it is humbling. Seriously, I gotta laugh or I’ll get mad and walk away and never ever play the stupid piano again!

But my pre-frontal cortex and neocortex are in love with it, because it’s new and challenging. I set an intention to practice 15 minutes in the morning, and 15 more in the evening, thinking, hmm, this is gonna be a challenge … but no, in fact, my brain loves it so much that I regularly practice 30 or 45 minutes and I don’t even notice time has gone by. I’m trying to lean into that space with more things, with mixed success.

I think about performers who have big bands and go on tours, and they have A Show that they do every night, and it never varies, and they do it exactly like that for months and months, maybe over a year or so. I would go batshit bonkers after 2 weeks. Not even kidding. I made up a set list for every gig, and never played the same show twice. I never even played all the same songs twice - because I just couldn’t stand it. My brain loves novelty.

So I’m going to have to find something new once piano becomes normal, which it eventually will. Maybe drums, because feet? Sure, I have room for a fuckin’ drum set in here, yeah, that’s not a problem … I think I have a few years to clear some space …