“School Daze”
In school, I had a tendency to daydream. I would sit in class
and hum to myself and look out the window. Whatever the teacher
was saying dissolved into a non-linguistic drone. Having no interest
in what was taught, I could not concentrate. Extremely bored,
I learned to be anywhere but in the moment!
By junior high school, I was a solidly dysfunctional learner;
one of many casualties.
I remember taking a class in algebra, for example.
The first week or two I was involved in the subject,
but one day I missed five minutes of what the teacher was saying
and was lost for the rest of the semester.
Ashamed by this, I would keep quiet.
I developed a belief system of personal inadequency through
those experiences. It became the same with most courses.
After a few minutes of not understanding anything,
my mind would drift and I would space out.
Everything got kind of surreal. Every once in a while I would
try to tune in, but it seemed the teacher was no longer
speaking English. His or her mouth would be moving but the sound
coming out was “wawawawawa . . . ”
As I hid my ignorance day after day, the fire of low self-esteem
raged and with it the steam of escapism rose within me. I would
escape this self-loathing by absorbing myself in television
when I got home. My mind was quieted by the blue light
as I stimulated my senses with sugar.
Later on in life, I would find much more dynamic substances
with which to stuff my feelings.
In this way, the trials and failures of the day would drift
into distant memory, nont to disappear, but to arrange itself
as another piece of the mosaic of my dysfunctional existence.
It wasn’t until very much later in life, while in therapy,
that I heard the word “dysfunctional.” After being told I was
dysfunctional, I remember leaving the therapist’s office elated.
I wanted to celebrate! No wonder nothing ever worked.
I wasn’t a “bad” person, I just wasn’t functioning correctly.
What a relief!
As a kid I remember that toward the end of the day, I would have
gotten nothing done–no homework, no practicing, nothing.
I remember my father coming down the stairs from his nap every day
at 5:00 pm (he worked nights) and ask menacingly, “did Kenny practice?”
And my mom would say, “No, not yet.” He would look down at me
in the den watching television and point his finger, saying something
sternly to me. I don’t remember what it was, I was so busy cringing!
I would go to sleep having made a resolution to start the next day off
better. But the next day I would get overwhelmed, and the whole
dysfunctional process would begin again. I thought, in my self-loathing,
that I was lazy and stupid.
Mental hell on earth is waking up with expectations every morning
and going to sleep disappointed in yourself every night!
Are you in hell with your own level of musicianship?
Are you making progress?
It doesn’t matter how fast or slow your progress is.
The important thing is that you are taking steps forward.
Can you play something with Effortless Mastery today that you couldn’t
play yesterday?
Feel free to leave your comments here!
Thank you for being here as part of our Effortless Mastery Community.
To Your Effortless Mastery,
Kenny Werner
and
Dr. Andrew Colyer
KennyWernerLive.com
and
ConsciousWorldMedia.com
P.S. Click on this Amazon link to purchase your own copy of Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery:
Technorati Tags:
Kenny Werner, Kenny Werner Live, KennyWernerLive.com, Effortless Mastery, Effortless Mastery Tips, Jazz Blog, Dr. Andrew Colyer, ConsciousWorldMedia.com
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Using the Effortless Mastery steps, I definitely hear progress in my practicing. Thing is, alot of that delicious fluency evaporates when I sit in or play a gig. I’ve been viewing this as a “setback” (as in ‘back to the drawing board’), but it occurs to me that, if the advances in my technique during practice are real, then the problem I need to address is the disconnect between practicing and performance, not my technique per se. Wonder how I address that directly?