Time, Like An Ever-Rolling Stream

One of my New York Erics (every well-appointed person should have claim to several) once told me that if I were to practice scales every day, that I would experience a distinct transformation in 6 weeks.

Well.

I’ve tried it; and I have learned, and re-learned, several things. One: that it is remarkably difficult, even in an outwardly quiet life, and with excellent overall health, and with an instrument in the home – with all this, it is remarkably difficult to establish a habit of practice that can endure with any regularity for six consecutive weeks (or longer).

More tellingly: I don’t know what clock Eric was using, but by now I should realize that we are marching to very different drummers; not just Eric and I, but almost everyone I know. There are loads of self-help books and essays that assure us that a fixed period of time will suffice to produce fixed outcomes, but as far as I can see, the only realm in which this is at all reliable is with courses of antibiotics.

As a Brainy Young Child I became so imbued with the notion that I could do things faster than the average kid – I could read much faster than most of my peers for years, could solve math problems, knit a scarf, jump to a conclusion – that I discovered I even expected to gestate my offspring in something less than the routine 9 months. (It was karmic, and fortunately not a disaster, when I actually did it.)

But in this Act III of life, I have sufficient evidence to reconsider. I can still jump to conclusions, and to the ends of other peoples’ sentences, with unseemly velocity, if not invariable accuracy. Other activities take much more time, and might need to start again, and start again.

Piano scales seemed to be increasing in speed and flow, when I found I was growing tense and tired; the only way to figure out what is wrong is to slow things back down to where they are easy, and firm up the technical movements. (Working with a teacher would likely help, but not immediately likely.)

Living with other people, too, both in my home and beyond it, is in some ways a slow affair. In other years I met new people often enough, and stirred around often enough, to feel a kind of social velocity, the whirl of encounters and discoveries. In this time – especially since Covid – social life is infinitely slower, and what had been a varied and busy matrix is a much slower interweaving. In this chapter, life with humans involves curating existing relationships: watching one’s beloveds navigating their own growth, their own ups and downs; repairing old deficits; clarifying old misunderstandings; renegotiating old assumptions. I learn this slowly, and I respond slowly to it.

It is hard to slow down; to accept that some things will not rush, will not even flow. But perhaps I could appreciate having the time that those things will take.