Geology...

Shaving mirror --- pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom window. Properly adjusted, it reflected Arthur Dent's bristles. He shaved them off, washed, dried, and stomped off to the kitchen to find something pleasant to put in his mouth.

Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee. Yawn.

The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment in search of something to connect with.

The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one. 

He stared at it.

``Yellow,'' he thought and stomped off back to his bedroom to get dressed.

                                                   - Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy


This week I caught myself doing something that I could not immediately explain.  Tuesday morning, on the drive to work, I was trying to go through my mental list of what I had to do at work, and the word "Geology" floated across my consciousness.  And then was gone.

For some reason, I took note of the fact, and stopped my mental perusal of my task list long enough to think about it.  It was a familiar word.  Not in the I-have-a-vocabulary-that-includes type of familiar.  More of a secret passage sort of word.  The kind of word that digs deep into memories of childhood challenges at the door to the clubhouse.  The familiarity of a pet name that your first love used to call you when whispering sweet nothings in your ear.

Where had that come from?  Why is 'Geology' showing up on my to-do list?

When I figured it out, I was amazed at what it said about my memory.

My sister and I have had a couple of interesting conversations about neural pathways.  She became interested in it, I suspect, because as an actress, she had to understand how her won brain worked to shove monologues and commercial lines and dialogue and soliloquies down specific rabbit holes, carefully nestled where she could access them when she wanted.

Meanwhile, my mother-in-law has been struggling with her short-term memory.  In an unexpected discovery, and I have found that she can detect lying with relative ease (her BS detector is on high alert when she is around me) and she actually remembers details better when she is processing them, rather than trying to remember them.

Case in point: On a recent trip, she asked me what my mom was up to.  I told her.  A short while later, she asked me again.  I gave her the same answer.

The third time she asked, I answered:

"You know, she has actually taken up mixed martial arts, and is competing quite well on the local level.  It is great cardio exercise, and she is doing some weight training besides.  The only difficulty is that she has to explain to her sunday school class where the cuts and bruises are from."

She looked at me, eyes narrowed.  "You are lying to me."

Twinkle in my eye, I agreed - yes, ma'am, I am lying - and told her what my mom was really doing.

AND SHE REMEMBERED IT.

I suspect that because she is processing the information, evaluating it for truth, and then associating it with a devious son-in-law, she has far better recall of that fact than she does when she is simply presented uncategorized data.

Back to my story.

When the word 'Geology' floated across my mind like a bulldozer looking for something to attach itself to, I stopped and looked at it.

My first year of college was the first time that I had to work to keep up with my classwork.  High school had passed without much of a need for any system.  But that first semester, I found myself making mental lists of the things that I had to complete for my classes.

My first class was Geology.

My list would start, Geology, I gotta read chapter four and prepare for the quiz.  English, review essay notes, Psychology, nothing to prepare....

...and so on.  But the first class of the semester was geology.  And it was always at the top of the to-do list.

The super cool part was that I realized that I have been using the exact same list since 1988.  I have not thrown away that piece of neural paper and grabbed another; I have simply added to the list and (maybe) crossed stuff out.

I always figured that my memory was taking the new list and putting it somewhere similar.  Going down the same neural pathway, because that is the way my brain processes to-do items.

But it is not.  It has not updated the list.  The list is not a bunch of Post-It notes in one room of my brain.  It is a scroll stashed on my desktop.  And every time I pick up the scroll, the word Geology is at the top of the scroll.

When I thought about it, I was pleased and amazed to realize that I had been saying 'Geology' under me breath every time I made a list.  The reason the word was so familiar was because I had been using it every time I made a list.

It was my memory, whispering sweet nothings in my ear.

Bomb Threat... and forgotten memories.

"Your vehicle insurance has expired, and we have tried to contact you multiple times.  This will be our third and final call to allow you to take advantage of our special offer," the recorded voice on my phone said to me.

"If you wish to speak to a customer service representative, press 1."

"1."

I hate these calls, and there is no reason that I should be receiving it on my government issued phone.  So Friday morning, I pressed "1" and snarled into the phone.  "You have called the US Federal Government, and I want to know why you are calling this phone."

A deeply accented male voice responded with a similar snarl.  "Who the f** are you?  What is YOUR name?"

"This is James Lawton with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and you have NO reason to call a government phone."

"Are you familiar with 9-11?  Osama bin Laden was one of us.  And the World Trade Center?  We did that.  Osama is my brother, and we are all coming for you.

"Your US Army is filled with sleeper cells, and we are going to rise up against you."

After quite a bit of vivid description of how I had engaged in fellatio with a number of folk, some of whom are related to me, the guy suggested some improbable physical acts, and then he left me with a statement.  "Tomorrow, we will be bombing a Marine Corps base in New Jersey."

And he hung up.

During the call, I walked out of my office into the hall, where a co-worker shushed me - there were meetings taking place in rooms all up and down the corridor.  But when she heard the tenor of the conversation, her eyes grew wide.

By the time the caller hung up, I was shaking, I was so mad.

Yeah, the call was not coming from a 601 number.

I talked it over, first with a couple of co-workers, and then with the security guy (who had done the exact same thing I did, and had an identical conversation, right down to the fellatio suggestion). He said that there was nothing in the message that identified it as a credible threat.  There was nothing specific mentioned, nothing that indicated that I had been chosen to communicate a genuine threat.  No declaration against projects of the Corps, no locations that meant anything to me.

The caller was, he explained, a member of a group in the Middle East who call up cell phones with the intent to harass.

All the same, all day Saturday, I was watching for something to happen in New Jersey.  It was no consolation that Saturday's attack happened in Pittsburgh, or that it was a white guy that did it.  All the same, I breathed a little easier when the day passed without 'my' incident happening.

There was a crazy thing, though.  For years, my sister Caroline and I have had recurring conversations about neural pathways, about how you form new memories and learn new things.  And specifically, how you can use existing neural pathways to access memories.

While I was relating the story to a co-worker on Friday, suddenly the hairs on my neck stood up.  I was suddenly reliving a memory of a previous call, received years ago, also made to my government cell phone.  The phone call in New Orleans had been almost exactly the same as the one Friday, except it closed with a non-credible threat against my wife rather than an unspecified military base.

My wife.

Once I remembered the incident, I remembered other pieces.  A memory of absolutely losing my mind.  I have a fragment of a memory of me screaming incoherently into the phone - in my office - about the actions that I was going to take to track the man down, to dismember his body, and to stomp individual pieces of his body to pieces of meat, indistinguishable from the dust with which his blood was going to mingle.  Another scrap of memory of spittle flying from my mouth as I turned purple with absolute rage.  A memory of trying to track down the source of the call, with no success.  (Cloning and spoofing cell phones was a pretty novel concept at that point.)

Before I started describing Friday's call, I HAD NO RECOLLECTION OF THE EARLIER CALL. My brain had tucked that particular bit of information down a disused neural pathway, and did not let me have access.  I have never understood how people could sublimate traumatic experiences, and what their brains would do to hide the memory of emotional and physical pain.  But my brain had done exactly that.  Only by relating Friday's experience did I get a chance to re-experience the fury and fear associated with a threat on my wife.

The threat against Kathe was no more credible than the threat against the Marine Base in Jersey.  And I knew that.  But it played on the same fear - the fear of an attack on something I hold dear.

Nobody can threaten me with things that I don't care about.  Threaten me with extra taxes on balut?  That might affect me once, if that.  Threaten to destroy old copies of Ranger Rick?  Huh.  I'm a little nostalgic on that one, but OK. 

But threaten my family, and the game changes entirely.

I hate the fact that this happens.  I hate that I lost control.  And I have no idea what we - as good people - are supposed to do to address the problems that result in such hate.

I wold love to think that this call is the modern equivalent of "Is your refrigerator running?  Well, you'd better run and catch it."  or "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?  Well, you better let him out!"

But it is not.  It is much deeper than that.  It is the result of extreme tribalism - where we humans (all of us!) break people into 'us' and 'them'.  And that dichotomy makes me sad.

I suspect that love is the only answer - loving my enemies, blessing them that curse me, doing good to them that hate me, and praying for them which despitefully use me. For if I love them which love me, what is my reward?  Everybody does that.

But it is a dilemma.  I also feel protective of my tribe.  My people. And my mind works overtime when I feel y'all are in danger.

Go love some people, y'all.  

Change the world

"No, no, no, no, nooooOOOO!"

"Did Thib come out this way?"

It is a repeated conversation in my household.  I leave doors open where the dogs can get out and join me on the porch, in the yard, wherever.  They like to hang out with me, and love the freedom that being outside with me gives them.  I usually watch them pretty closely, so that they aren't eating stuff they aren't supposed to.  And they occasionally give chase to a squirrel or a chipmunk and stop listening for my commands.

Kathe is more of a preventive maintenance kind of gal.  She makes sure the gas level doesn't get dangerously low.  She gets her 50k mile car maintenance done at 45,000 miles.  Thanks to her, we have tp in every bathroom, clothes are clean and dry and in the closet, and there is always food in the pantry.

And the dogs do not spend any time running free in the yard.

They are two approaches, plain and simple. Neither one is better than the other.  My way leads to unnecessary excitement from time to time, when that 25-gallon truck tank gets down to 0.056 gallons left.

Seriously.

The dogs are not as well protected from harm under my care.  They might find something to munch on that would give them a bellyache or worse.  And Thib is notorious for eating stuff he isn't supposed to.... and has the enterotomy scars to show for it. (Not my fault, for what it's worth)

But without letting them run 'free', I have no chance to teach them what is allowed and what is not.  Which means if they do get out, I have no control.

The occasional loss of control allows me to teach, correct, and get them to accept the commands I give.  We can practice what we expect.

Trade off.

I work at an agency that works on the assumption that if you follow the process. the same way, every time, you end up with a consistent product.  We are engineers, and we are military, and we follow orders and we follow procedure, and we love templates and predictability.

There is truth to the old joke - you ask an engineer what the volume of the blue rubber ball is, he looks it up in his blue rubber ball table.  Same result, every time.

I was recently in a class.  It was a really good class on the procedure that our agency uses, with the compelling and immediately understandable acronym PMBP.  The class was good.  The speaker was engaging, and kept my attention for the full 8 hours of the class: no easy feat.  For some reason, however, my ears perked up at one of his assertions.  I had heard variations on this theme over and over through the years:

"Faster, Better, Cheaper.  Pick two.  You cannot do all three."   It is one of the basic tenets of project management.  If you require something fast, you have to cede efficiency on one level or another.

But there was something in that simple statement that bothered me, and it related to my aforementioned loss of control with the dogs.  After the class was over, I stopped him and challenged him on the statement.

"Sir, Eli Whitney, with his cotton gin.  Henry Ford with the assembly line. Edison with the light bulb.  Al Gore and his internet."

"OK," he said, "I'll grant you that. But those were not ordinary efforts.  What you are talking about are all things that changed the world - they are actions that changed the course of history."

"I understand," I told him.  "And during a lecture of process is not the right time to discuss it.  But what you describe here is the rule of efficiency, using the way that we are currently doing business.  If we look at things differently, there is a possibility of making changes that can do all three.

"If we are not allowing ourselves the possibility of thinking differently, we have no chance to change the world."

I know that the inside of a large Federal burrocrazy is not the likeliest place to look to make that kind of change.  But the principle is more pervasive than that.  Instead of working to train people in good planning, we are creating templates that even an idiot cannot screw up, with checklists to make sure that we did everything in the template.  We work at preventative maintenance, rather than at creative problem solving.  We look for our answers in look-up tables, and we make sure that the details are right. We use the everlasting go-by because it was approved before, rather than re-framing our documents to fit the organization of the problem and solution.

And sometimes, in our attempt to avoid loss of control, we miss the fact that our question is wrong, because we have never left our dogs running free in the yard.  There is no chance for learning, because we have prescribed the process so completely that there is no room for error.

Innovation should not be exclusively in the domain of the private sector.  It needs to be part of our Federal process as well.  We need to take a chance that something small will go wrong, so that we have the possibility of learning, growing, and creating for ourselves, making it so we can come up with the better solution when the big questions arise.  Without an investment in innovation, and without that commitment, we will have empty process, and no inculcated ability to think beyond the template, the checklist, the go-by.  In the process, we are safe.

In the process, we lose the chance to change the world.

Music rant

David Finley, Bruce Baker, GianMarco Beltram, Windi Sebren, and a couple of others, you are exempt from this.

Open letter to the rest of you:

I did not know you liked Prince.

I did not hear from you that David Bowie was the most amazing performed you had ever seen; that the concert of his you saw changed your life.

I did not know that the soundtrack to your life was exclusively written and performed by Merle Haggard.

You never said. I never heard you talking about going out to hear the live music.  I never got to watch the uploaded video of you screaming out the lyrics to your favorite song in a karaoke bar.

I DID watch that kitten video you posted.  It was cute.

But why did you wait until after he died to eulogize Prince?  I started watching the videos, and mercy.  I understand why I was not a fan when I was growing up.  He was too edgy, combining a raw male sexuality with femininity in a way that I did not have any mechanism to interpret.  I enjoyed his music a lot; I know all the lyrics to his popular tunes, and I
loved the sexual innuendoes that pervaded each lyric. I even went to Glam Slam the one time I was in Minneapolis (a friend was a HUGE fan).

But I did not really know about his musicality until you started sharing the videos yesterday.  I missed an opportunity to recognize his genius when he was alive... because you didn't tell me you were a fan. How had I missed this?  Sure, MTV showed the polished videos of Prince back in the 80s, but heck - even the Backstreet Boys had polished videos.

I'm talking about music, because that is a passion of mine, and because after watching the video of his induction into the Hall of Fame, I was just floored.  But for all of the fact that music floats my little red wagon, the same applies to every venue: artists, actors, gem polishers, mimes, flint knappers, all of the people who fill your life with meaning...

Please.  Let's change that.  Tell me who you listen to, who you watch, and where I should go and see the play that changed your life.

Tell me, so that I can glory in their brilliance, revel in their genius, and light up with a new-found gem that I can carry with me. I want to see what changed your life, and maybe have a chance at the same thing. And please, please, please,

Don't wait until they are dead.  Because then it will be too late.

Check Out the Fractals.

We were talking about some pipe dreams each of us has, and a friend of mine met my objection before I had even had a chance to voice it.  "If it takes too long, why not start now? How old will you be in five years if you DON'T follow that dream?"

I provided the obligatory clever retort.  But the sentiment has stuck with me.

How old will I be in five years if I don't do it?

I have mentioned my sister before regarding her learning to play the accordion.  All her life, Caroline has played the long game.  She looks into the distant futures, finds a future she wants, and starts on the intermediate tasks that will get her there.  This is not a new thing with her - I saw her figuring out costs and benefits when she was a baby contemplating taking her first steps.  And then again when she decided to swim.  And then again when she learned to read. 

A couple of months ago, when I was comparing musical notes with her, she told me her goal - she wants to be the 80-year-old lady who plays the accordion. If, as current popular theory states, it requires 10,000 Gladwellian practice hours to achieve mastery over a task, then she will plan on being an expert in 40 years. 

10,000 hours over the course of 40 years is only 250 hours a year.  An average of just over 40 minutes a day.

Very long game.  A friend of mine shared a quote with me this week:

When Pablo Casals (then aged 93) was asked why he continued to practice the cello three hours a day, Casals replied, "'I'm beginning to notice some improvement...'

The game is long, but focusing on the game means that you are breaking the process up into bearable units.  Although 10,000 hours seems like an insurmountable summit, 40 minutes is doable.

More important than the bite-sized practice sessions, though, it helps keep expectations in check.  I get discouraged if my banjo playing doesn't improve.  If the lessons I learned yesterday don't stick.  If the song doesn't sound better than it did yesterday.  Or worse still, if it sounds worse.  If my fingers are stiff and don't limber up, if the timing just sounds wrong, if the tune I hear in my head cannot make it out onto the instrument.... I get frustrated and fed up.

Each discouragement means that it is harder to pick up the hated instrument and play for a half hour. (30 minutes a day means it is gonna take me a little longer than Caroline to get to the 10k plateau....)

But what happens when I am not working towards immediate gratification?  What a lift do I get when I know those damned scales are just part of a huge plan to get good?  Practicing those rolls are not an end to themselves, but part of a long-term project to increase strength and flexibility?

As part of my research in my previous life as an archaeologist, I looked at fractals, the self-replicating patterns that repeat at every scale.  It made sense to look at it to study stone tool debris; I can tell you that one small pile of debitage looks almost identical to another (just so you know, that is not enough to write a thesis on...).  But I am beginning to think that maybe my efforts to learn things happen in the same way.



Mandelbrot might have been a math genius, but I
bet he sucked at playing the banjo.

I work on my forward rolls on the banjo.  I see a little bit of improvement.  Not much, just a little bit.  I see this little part of the learning pattern, and I think I know where it is going. And if I look back, I can imagine where I was a week ago.

But at a larger scale, over the past year and a half, I can see the things that I have learned.  And they grow at about the same rate.  My practice and the improvement I have in my ability replicates itself over time.  I get better incrementally.  My breakthroughs are not as amazing as I remembered them to be.  My plateaus not so long. 

Last night I went back to my first banjo instruction book, and was delighted to find that some of the trickier parts of the book were not as tricky any more.  I was able to do even the unfamiliar tunes more quickly.  That I struggled less.

What happens in five years?  How far along will I be? 

Funny thing that I realized, though, is that it is not limited just to my music.  How does playing the long game change my ideas about exercise (instead of getting discouraged that I don't look like Charles Atlas after six months of push-ups)?  How would it change my attitude towards my career advancement?  My furthering of my education?  My work in the community? 

What happens if I take the long view? 

And what fractal in your life would YOU approach differently?

Doctor's Referral

Today, I am sending you over to my cousin's blog, so you can read the guest entry I wrote for him there. 

Please link to Dr. Andrew Lawton's blog.

Age is just a number

Her white hair, tied into a messy bun.  Her face, deeply lined, framing the brightest blue eyes you have ever seen.  Her face, permanently creased into a smile, looking like she is responding to a delicious joke you just told.

Skippy is friends with my uncle Harry, and when I came into town last time - for the funeral of my cousin - she offered to put my mother and me up for the night.  We showed up, and got loved on by the most delightful 87-year-old there is.  We talked for hours - about her garden, about her doll collection, about the beautiful land she has overlooking the marsh on Myrtle Island.

She reminds me of Cool MA. My compadre's grandmother lived around the corner from me when I was growing up in Greenville, and she was one of the most amazing, kindest women I have ever met. The stories I hear of her bestow on her the status of a minor deity.

Cool MA reminded me of my Nana, who was a chief cheerleader for everything her grandkids did.  She walked the beach for hours, marveling over evey shell we found, remarking with ineffable happiness how smart, how strong, how fast, how observant we were.

My Nana was very reminiscent of my Aunt Lolo.  Lolo was the brightest, happiest, kindest, most adventurous woman I have ever met.  I always loved going over to her house, even when I was at an age where going over to an older family member's house holds no appeal.  She was just cool, and had fascinating stuff to look through from her many travels.

Beautiful, strong, smart, kind, loving women.  And as they grew older, impossibly, their beauty deepened. In a culture that worships youth and strength and virility and unlined faces.... and in a culture that subsequently discards the young and beautiful when they become neither, I am blown away by these ladies, who seemed to weather the process with such incredible grace.

My cousin Andrew (genetic researcher, runner, musician, and dancer extraordinaire) is running in his second marathon, and blogging about it as he does his prep.  His running of the Chicago marathon is benefitting a charity that provides safe, affordable housing for seniors (if you feel so inclined to do such things, please support his effort).  His writing explores some of the issues about aging, and includes inspirational stories of people who bloom in old age.

As I am solidly (and getting more so every year) middle aged, I find myself fascinated to read what a scientist is thinking about the aging process.  The issues with memory.  The loneliness (so far his best blog entry here, which included a nice bit on juggling.) The life changes. 

And as I read his blog, reflecting on these amazing women in my life, and I find myself trying to figure out what made them special.  How did age develop such a lovely patina on

Fighting discouragement

Vignette #1

"I bought a banjo about a year ago.  And I have been working to teach myself how to play for the past year."

"Oh, well, that's good.  I understand it is the easiest instrument to play"

My next door neighbor is not known for his tact.  A concert pianist, he doesn't have a lot of sympathy for people who struggle with music.  It isn't unkindness.  It is just that he has no idea what it is like to struggle to make music.

Or maybe his struggle is simply in another form.

But those words just killed me.  My short fingers do not move quickly.  They do not stretch where they need to go.  They are not nimble, and they do not play the music I hear in my head.

Particularly because I do hear music in my head all the time - I am preternaturally susceptible to the earworm, and I go through my life with my own soundtrack (there is a woman who appears at regular intervals in my life to the theme of the Wicked Witch of the West) - it is a particular struggle when I can't get that music out. 

So I hear the music, and yet I struggle to make the instrument sing the way I hear it in my head.

And to hear a musician so easily dismiss my year of work to gain competence.... it hit harder than just having a bad session.

Vignette #2

My wife opened the kiln.  This firing was particularly slow, so we had been waiting on this moment for three days.  She reached in, and pulled out the tile....

...which was blistered and cracked.  The glaze had simply not adhered to the clay body, and the result looked awful.  This was the second batch she had run with a new clay, and it meant that her work for the past two weeks had been for nothing.

Vignette #3

A co-worker gets turned down for a supervisory job, and is supplanted by someone with less experience.  Five times in a row over three years.

and Vignette #4, and #5, and #6....

Everyone deals with disappointment.  But what do you do when it goes beyond just not getting the gig (or the girl, or the promotion....)

What the difference is, has nothing to do with the disappointment in not succeeding.  That element is in present in any process, and represents a temporary emotional setback. It is the discouragement (dis-cour: literally, losing heart) that really is the danger.  In high school, I read a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig. I have read it numerous times since, each time getting something different from it.  But I remember particularly his discussion on what he called 'gumption traps'.

Gumption traps, he explained, are the dangerous places in a project where you lose enthusiasm for the project.  And they can be external (where you have a setback) or internal (where you have a hang-up.)

So how do you deal with these traps?  How do you face disappointment without becoming discouraged?

No, seriously.  I am asking.

I am told that taking a break helps.  (Pirsig mentioned that mechanism for dealing with a setback.)This approach helps because it allows the brain to change perspective on the problem. 

Violence also helps.  Well, not exactly, but there is something cathartic about breaking things and using physicality to fight discouragement.  I once used about four days with a sledgehammer to fight off a discouraging setback (fortunately, the concrete sidewalk needed to come out anyway).

What other elements help you? What are your walls?  What happens when you hit your wall, and how do you push through it?

PSP - Problem Solving Priest

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a silly piece about wizardry and priests.  In it, I confessed that my understanding of electricity is very limited. If I am honest with myself, my comprehension basically ends with the statement, "there is majick going on here". The end result of that majick, I explained, is that when the majick fails, I have to call in a 'priest' (AKA a car mechanic, electrician, plumber) and make an 'offering' to the 'priest', so that he will 'bless' (repair) whatever it is that is broken.

I live in a land filled with well-paid priests.

This past week, I rode along with my brother Parker on a series of deliveries.  He works at an employee-owned lumber yard, and we were delivering sliding (yes, I know what the real spelling of that word is, but it is INTENTIONALLY misspelled.) And lumber.  And decking.

While we were driving around, I explained my priest-and-majick theory of the universe to him....  not realizing that my driver was a general priest himself.

 Problem Solving Part 1.

We got to the first site, and the forklift on the back of the truck was broken.  Turn the key, it grinds, but does not fire. I shrugged my shoulders

The Wizard and the Priest

I do not understand electricity.

I mean, I have gathered some facts.  There is something in there about water; water and electricity don't mix.  I also learned from painful experience that just because a table knife and an electrical outlet look like they would fit together, that they are not supposed to meet (I was four, and at my grandmother's house, but it made QUITE the impression).  I know that there is something about wearing rubber-soled shoes.  I also learned the left-hand and right-hand rule in Mama Chang's high school physics class, but I am not sure exactly what it governs.

Diagnosing electrical problems, therefore, is a fascinating process for me.  Mostly, it follows the following rubric:

*flips switch*
*nothing happens*
*flips switch*
*flips switch*
*flips switch*
Me: "It must be broken."

My wife, who grew up with a dad who had electrical engineering training,

Recital

Kathe and I have been taking music lessons for a month.  I have my banjo; she has a keyboard (although what she really wants is a piano.)

We are adult music students, a bit of a rarity.  And we both are convinced that we can do it, and we devote the time to practice, like we never could (or did) when we were kids. We set aside time, and are very protective of that time, because we have a goal in mind. We want to play.

What we are doing is very different from what kids do when they are given lessons. 

The typical child lesson (I have made some assumptions here) goes something like this: MomnDad decide child progeny (CP) is going to learn an instrument.  They give CP a choice: oboe or saxophone; CP chooses the one CP think is best/coolest/least dorky/easiest-to-hide-in-the-locker-at-school.  (Or, if you have a piano in the house, you get to learn piano).  M&D buy the instrument, and go about finding a suitable tutor.

And when I say ‘suitable’, what I really mean is ‘affordable’.

CP is encouraged to practice, and at the end of the semester/year, is rewarded with an opportunity to dress up and give a concert, that M&D attend.

From CP’s perspective, here is what happens:

M&D: “Do you want to give up the last remaining shred of video game time to practice the tuba, or to practice the piccolo?”

And just like that, CP is suddenly forced to give up a half-hour to an hour of every day to practice an instrument that he does not love, and then spends an additional hour with an adult who gets to be a

agricola, agricolae agricolarum....

I went to my first banjo lesson.  It was terrible.  I was completely out of rhythm, my fingers were stiff and clumsy, I got frustrated and, for the first time since I bought it, I hated that damned banjo.

Afterwards, I got in the car and Kathe, all excited, asked me how it went.

"It was awful," was all I said.

What happened?  Since I have been writing here, it has been "banjo" this, and "music" that.... and suddenly, I just detest the bloody thing?  How is that even possible?

Le ROI Est Mort, Vive Le ROI!

"The problem with music," Adam told me, "is that it is hard to determine the ROI."

I nodded, looking pensive.  He has his acronyms, I have mine.  And if I nod long enough, he will usually catch me up.

I nodded again.  I am pretty sure that he reads me well enough to know that the second nod (especially when I don't jump in with an unnecessary re-statement of what he just said) means that I am hopelessly lost, and need a little hint.

"See, if you can't measure your success in traditional ways," he explained further, "you don't know if your return on investment is a good one."

Got it.  Return On Investment. ROI.

I nodded again.

"Only too old when you're dead"

When is it too late to start?

"My belief is you're only too old when you're dead."

A friend of mine posted that sentence this weekend, and it just resonated with me.  I have never met Windi.  We are friends of mutual friends on facebook, and admire each other from that distance.   (Well, I can only speak for myself - I admire her...).  As our mutual friend said once, 'Windi is a force of nature - she decides to do something, and throws herself into it with no sense that she is not world class at it.  And pretty soon, she is teaching her flamenco instructor moves.'

Is it any wonder I am a fan?

Windi decided to start learning the fiddle, so that she could play Irish tunes.  Nobody showed her how, she just bought a violin, accessed some online videos and started playing. 

At first, she posted progress online, and her playing was somewhere south of virtuoso.  But I was intrigued, and followed her progress, always looking forward to the next video sample.  It was not long before the tunes were not only recognizable, but even pretty good.

Now, just one year removed from her first sawing of bow and string, she is looking for a band to play with.  I can't wait to hear her first jam session.

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My sister Caroline picked up the accordion when she was in London a couple of years ago at age 39.  And no, she was not looking to polka or even (sadly) zydeco.  She had in mind the image of the French cafe accordion player.  And for several months, she just played (um) quietly in her apartment in her spare time, teaching herself left fingering and right keyboarding and chord progression, and....

And one day she had her window open and people under her apartment shouted up some encouragement.  She has since played in bars and auditions and teaches herself new songs all the time.

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What is it that you feel is beyond you?  Sure, high school French was brutal, but you find that you are intrigued by Mandarin Chinese? You have a hidden passion for stargazing, and want to learn astronomy? Or is there a musical instrument that you want to play?

Is it too late? Is it true, that Old Dogs Cannot Learn New Tricks?

Our understanding of neural pathways is based on a use-it-or-lose-it model.  If you have not learned what you need by the time you hit puberty, it is too late.  No late-life prodigies in music.  No second career geniuses in foreign languages.

Linguistics studies particularly point to an early developmental time frame when language acquisition is possible, and anything after that is impacted by the fact that you didn't learn it when you were 5 years old.  The brain wires itself along specific neural pathways, linguists tell us, and re-routing those pathways is almost impossible.

Badgerdoodle.  Absolute poppysmeg.

We rewire neural pathways all the time.  We learn new words, new names, and we stick them in  our memory banks in different ways.  Yes, we adults have established a way of learning and those pathways are entrenched.  That might make it hard to organize that new knowledge.

But we also have experience under our belts on what learning works best for us.

Maybe you are a kinetic learner, and know that you learn best while doing aerobics.  Or you are an auditory learner, and can put things to music to memorize them.  Because you have experience with learning, you can take advantage of what you already know about yourself to make the learning easier.

I am convinced that the main difference between adults and kids is embarassment.  Not that kids are not embarassed by making a mistake in public (I recall a particularly horrifying moment when I was in fourth grade crying while cutting edges off of the paper I was turning in) but that adults encourage the kid when mistakes are being made.  And adults who are motivating themselves see the embarassment as a reason to stop.

But consider this: when you were learning your first language, how many times did your parents have to repeat the following sequence before you got it right?

"Dat gog toy."
"That's right, son.  That's the dog's toy."
"Dat gog toy."
"That's right. That's the dog's toy."

Why would it be any different to learn to speak Basque?  New words, new order, new syntax, new everything.  We are going to mispronounce the words, and use the wrong forms, over and over. We will fail and grit our teeth and try again, and fail again.  Just like when we were kids.  Is it just that we are more hardwired to high expectations?

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My friend Adam works in knowledge management, and has been studying how organizations share information. And the change to sharing of information in the corporation requires three things: (check out his blog), motivation, ability, and trigger.

I think that the analogy is pretty apt for use in learning any new task, not just in corporate learning.  We all use these tasks in taking on a new task that we have never done before, whether learning computer coding or making French sauces.  We need the motivation, we need the ability, and we need the trigger.

The motivation is probably the greatest change between learning a new task for a child versus learning a new task for an adult.  Mom made me take piano lessons when I was in second grade.  What was my motivation there?  Was it because I decided I needed to be able to play music? 

Um, no.

But when my wife decides that she wants to learn the piano as an adult, what is her motivation?  No longer is it just a matter of pleasing her mom.  She is her own motivator.

The ability sector is "teaching people how to do things." This is the practice.  The physical repetition of the fingering, repeating the vocalizations until you can make a voiced glottal fricative on command, or the practicing of the steps until the samba is second nature. 

The final piece, as I understand it, is the trigger - the place where we re-create the response.  If you always listen to your Russian conversation tapes in the car on your drive to work, then your Russian is going to be strongest in the car, where the association is strongest (part of the reason that you are suggested to practice taking standardised tests in the room where you will be taking them). 

None of this is beyond the grasp of someone who wants to learn.

Will it be frustrating?  YES.

Will it be vexing? YES. 

Will you get a strange gratification when something makes sense? YES.

And see, that is the beauty of learning anything new - the gratification (elation, even?) of succeeding.  But instead of running to mom to share the success, I get it all to myself.  And then I reinforce it with more work on the ability sector.  And reinforce it again.  And again.... smiling with each repeated success.

 

It is terrifying to jump into something new.  My wife bought me a banjo this year, and I practice every free moment.  But I gotta confess - I am terror-stricken when I think of playing my banjo in front of people.  My hands shake at the best of times, and the thought of adding a little performance anxiety to top it off, well, I am pretty frightened. That embarassment potential is almost reason enough to stop.

 

But maybe all that means is that I need to change the trigger.  Maybe move to a more public place for playing the three songs I currently have in my repertoire.  Stretch my comfort zone to include front porch playing.  Maybe post a short video of Cripple Creek.  Laugh at the mistakes, and know that eventually, that sentence will come out right. 

 

"That's the dog's toy." 

 

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For those who teach, a nice blog entry from the teacher's perpective can be found here.