"I'll See You Again"

This is a sweet waltz from a Noel Coward operetta, 1929. Nothing really special, but nice all the same.

We pause for a brief moment, to honor my iMac, which made me so happy, and which is now dead. Heavy sigh. No data lost, yet, just the trauma of a black screen. Also, Happy Birthday, Lydia!

I've been thinking about my laziness recently. This process started during my recent piano lessons. I am very lazy about music theory, and sometimes it would be so much easier if I would take a minute to think about what key I'm in, or what the basic structure of the piece is, and I just don't want to take the time. I could, it's within my abilities, but I don't. And that got me thinking about lots of moments when it might be very helpful to stretch my brain just the slightest bit outside my comfort zone of familiar thought patterns, outside those problems that are fun to solve, into the not-totally-unknown realm. It sometimes seems like it would be easier to learn or do something really different--speak Turkish, do cave scuba, raise tigers--rather than do something not so far reached, totally within my limits and even experience, but something that would involve what seems like a lot of effort in exchange for the boredom of the almost-familiar. But this seems to be where the real growth takes place, stretching in these uncomfortable nearby places. Learning Turkish is a fad, here today, gone tomorrow when the CDs from the library are due, but actually practicing the music theory that I learned could change how I approach my daily music ration in noticeable ways immediately. I already know what I need to know, just the hurdle of application to overcome.

And that is it. That's why I can have an ear for languages, but I never became fluent in any of them. The fear of that application hurdle. What if it's too hard? What if people think I'm stupid/bright? What if I do well and then I have to go even farther, learn something even more difficult?

I think this is why some people are brilliant and lots of other people are just clever and/or smart. Maybe the brilliant people manage to overcome that shyness in application, they step forward bodly to practice while others preach. This is my new goal: to find the places where I hesitate to put my learning into action, and to get it over with, get started. It's always the hardest part: to begin.