Brain Shower

This entry was delayed by the death and burial of my grandmother, a very special woman to whom I was very close.

The last three days’ focus was to work on a poem.

Result: I enjoyed the brainstorming stage of writing the poem. I’m technically still in the brainstorming stage. When I began with my three-days’-focus series, I promised myself that I would not be too hard on myself for an unfinished project. And to that I hold.

The trouble, for me, in any creative work, is that, sometimes, I just have to make a choice, and I cannot expect every choice to be perfect. I pursue perfection, yet I know that I won’t achieve it.

The question for me will become, when I make it past the brainstorming stage, can I come up with something coherent that says what I want to say.

The next three days’ focus project: work on exercises that are in my piano book. I took four years of lessons at KWU, and, I’ll admit, I never really practiced. I think that I passed because my instructor was more interested that I understand the concepts of playing… that, and, at least during my lessons, I was able to do what she wanted me to do. At the time that I was a music major at KWU, the program was still building and solidifying. Does this excuse my lack of proficiency? No, certainly not. I was more concerned with my class attendance (the skill of commitment-keeping) and my emotional growth, social growth, and involvedness than I was with actually building skills. College, it seems, for me was a 3.75-year foray into learning how to think… I recount with embarrassment how it always seems like I know a fair amount of things, but I can do hardly anything.

There is a difference between intelligence and smartness. To illustrate this, I go back to a conversation with one of my college instructors. This conversation took place about six months ago. The professor said to me, in a tone of comfort (necessary because I was coping with mistreatment at the time), that I was “pretty smart,” and at, at the time, this didn’t make sense to me. “Pretty smart? I’ve had people complimenting my intelligence all my life! You’re just downplaying it because I’m not good at what you do, because I don’t have the skills and didn’t succeed all that much.” It was moronic to think this… Perhaps, if I’d had guts and said this thought out loud, I might’ve learned faster the difference that I now understand. This particular instructor is also a coach, and the activity that he coaches requires not that people be intelligent, but that they be smart. Smartness, then, is intelligence in action. By this definition, I’m not very smart. I have the intelligence to learn smarts, but I need to focus and practice in order to obtain these smarts.

As far as being a musician goes, it’s quite embarrassing to sit down at a piano and not be able to do what my brain wants done. I have many of the piano concepts in my head, but that only makes me intelligent. It doesn’t make me piano-smart. I’m going to spend the next three days, starting tomorrow because tonight I’m covering a high school football game on the radio, working rather hard to build some piano smarts. They say that it takes about 10,000 hours of commitment to master something… I’m going to see if I can make it at least 15 hours closer to piano mastery.