Playing Together
I went to a great concert last night, and it’s made me think about why it is that I like hanging out with musicians. Now, I don’t know any rock stars, but because I’m an avid contra dancer, I get the opportunity to spend time around people who are the rock stars of our little, folkie dance world. And nothing could be more fun, because these people are da bomb. They are who I want to be when I grow up. But I’m wondering if those of us who aren’t massively talented and committed musicians could learn a thing or two about how to practice life from these people. Here’s what I’ve seen:
1) They don’t call it “playing” music for nothing. Every musician I know, while taking their craft extremely seriously, comes at the making of music with the spirit of play and experimentation. They like to try stuff and see what happens. And they don’t worry about it when something sounds terrible, they just try something else. They know that there is no right or wrong way to play a tune, and they take great joy in messing around with things to see what happens. And in the process, they laugh. A lot.
2) They listen. You can’t play in a band, or at least not any kind of a decent band, without putting as much effort into how your sound blends with everyone else as into personally getting the sound you want. Musicians understand that there are times to step forward and solo, times to let someone else take the lead, and times to create such a seamless whole that no one person stands out, only the overall synthesis of the group.
3) They know that energy rebounds. Which is to say that dance musicians get a charge from creating a platform for the dancing out of their energy and skill, which is fed by the energy and skill of the dancers. What you give comes back to you, enhanced by the receiver. Joy bounces.
4) They like to learn stuff. Give Irish fiddlers a chance to take a class with someone who plays Zydeco and they come flocking. Not because they’re planning on becoming professional Zydeco fiddlers, but because Hey, that’s so cool! Percussionists pick up the ukulele and guitarists try the marimba, just because it’s there.
5) It’s all about the love. If you give a group of musicians a chance to sit down and jam together, not only do they take that chance, but they don’t stop. Really. They don’t stop. Whenever I’ve sat down to listen to these jam sessions I’ve had to drag myself off at one or two in the morning with no sign that the players were slowing down in any way (although they may have shifted genres). They are not paid for these sessions. Hardly anyone listens who isn’t playing, and no one applauds. They play, and keep playing, because they are desperately in love with their instruments; with the sound; with the people they are playing with, whether they are strangers or people they’ve been performing with for years; with the fact that they are on this planet and able to create.
That’s what musicians know: Play. Listen. Share. Learn. Love. No wonder my musician friends are so massively cool.
O Parenting: You Humble Me
photo by Jenna Starr
Our Little Bean is starting to stand, ever-so-momentarily, on her own. Meanwhile, our lives careen on with her a central part of them: family trips and visits with friends, work and projects, housekeeping and grocery shopping. Occasionally I am blessed with the help of a babysitter or nanny. And as I introduce that person to our home and our quirks, I can’t help but remember to myself my own thoughts and, yes, judgments about people I have babysat or nannied for in years past. Little things make so much more sense to me now. Realizing the judgments I had made while having not-a-clue what parenting really entailed is humbling. There’s no way to really explain it all to a new person entering into our lives. And all of this is humbling: our messy home, needing someone who is initially a complete stranger to come and help, the intimacy of showing someone all the details of how to care for our child, and remembering my own judgments, now years past.
I remember, for example, being quite struck that one mother I nannied for regularly would go to the grocery store and buy bags and bags of groceries and then bring them home and leave them, still fully packed, sitting on the kitchen floor. I mean: the refrigerator was right there. Those eggs were getting warm, sitting there. But now I’ve done the same multiple times: brought in a load of groceries from the car and left the bags sitting on the kitchen counter or floor while I run to the bathroom, deal with a crying kid, check in with my partner, or, I dunno, take a breath and look at the mail for a second. So many things that used to seem like immediate necessities have taken a backseat. Some days The Babysitter comes and I haven’t made the bed yet. Or had anything to eat. To say nothing of the state of the kitchen floor upon which the baby is probably crawling and picking up little fragments of things she’ll inevitably put into her mouth….
There’re all the subtle realities of parenting and letting-go, too. I know there are hundreds of things, little judgments, I made in my mind before becoming a parent and while observing other parents. “I will never let my kid hang out in a poopy diaper.” “I will never feed my kid processed food.” “I will never get angry and snap at my kid.” Blahblahblah I could come up with a hundred, a thousand more of these little judgmental thoughts I’m sure I had, that I still have. But as we approach the end of year one, I’ve learned a hundred times over that pretty much anything I’ve said “I will never…” about I will, at some point, do. Yet again my tendency towards black-and-white, all-or-nothing ways of looking at things rears its head and reminds me: try for the middle ground. Try for “average,” a mentor told me once, for “mediocre.” Accept my own humanity and imperfectness and get on with things like making dinner and doing the dishes.
I’ve just had the pleasure of delving into a delightful mystery by Louise Penny that was given to my partner and which I totally took over sometime during a recent long, multiple-times-interrupted-by-a-wide-awake-baby night. In this first in the series, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache teaches his trainee the four most important sentences to use in their detective work: “I’m sorry.” “I don’t know.” “I need help.” “I was wrong.” What a beautiful teaching. We could all use these sentences in our lives, and certainly as parents. Every day, as our Little Bean learns a dozen new things, I learn at least a few along with her. And often, it’s that I was wrong about this-or-that, or so arrogant some years (or months, or days) ago. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I pretty much always need help. And there’s so, so much about which I don’t know.
But I am learning, and I am grateful. Holly Near has a song about this that I love the first verse of especially: “I am open, and I am willing, for to be hopeless, would be so strange…” But maybe I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know? Maybe you knew this song already? Along with Norah Jones “Humble Me”? And so it goes. Thanks for reading.
Spiritual Lessons from the Passenger’s Seat
Though she took the book learning part of Drivers Ed this summer, my 16 year old did not get her temporary license until last Monday. That’s because on Tuesday, we were leaving for a 1500 mile roadtrip for a family Thanksgiving, and it seemed like an ideal time to teach her to drive.
When I say “ideal time,” let me qualify that. To me, the “ideal” time to drive with her would have been after she had also taken the behind the wheel drivers’ ed class where the person in the passenger seat, a trained instructor, also has a brake pedal. But, oddly, that’s not how they do it anymore. They want the parents to teach the kids to drive, before the professional teacher ever gets into a car with them. While I find that bizarre and wrong, that massive group of people without 16 year olds seems to find it logical for some reason.
So, we headed off into the sunset, driving from Minnesota to northern Ohio. And then back. Safe and sound. With the sixteen year old driving at least 600 of the 1500 miles! And here’s what I learned, which I share thinking maybe it has application beyond this particular situation!
1. There is no time when beginning will feel safe, but make it as safe as you can. If you wait for safety, your kids will grow old and retire before you ever step aside and allow them to drive. But think through what will feel the safest to you. For me, it was a three lane highway in rural Wisconsin.
2. Start by imitating someone else. We drove around on a few country roads to experience starting and stopping, and then I said, “Just get in the right lane. No passing. Just follow whatever car is in front of you and go the speed limit.” That business of following someone else at first, even if they are the slowest, clunkiest, trailer on the road, is still a good way to begin.
3. Plan in advance how you’ll stop if you need to. Besides staying in the right lane, I knew that we would only switch drivers in wayside rests. No intown driving, no cloverleaves or complicated off-ramps. Just pulling over to a big parking lot on the side of the road.
4. Only do the one thing. In this case, it was driving. At first, we had no radio, no conversation about anything but driving, no eating. In the passenger’s seat, I did not answer phone calls or even look at maps. It was all driving, all the time, for both of us, until that was very comfortable and easy.
5. Consider challenging situations that might arise before they do, when life is calm. Talk about what to watch for in other drivers, to know when they might do something unpredictable. What to do if bad weather hits. What if a flat tire occurs.
6. Verbalizing things that you do intuitively will impress you with the complexity of what you know. In driving, as in other parts of life, there are hundreds of automatic decisions made. As we drive for years on end, we aren’t even conscious of many of them. I found it interesting and fun to speak out loud about things such as whether or not I trust another driver or when to pull back or when to push forward on the road.
7. Despite good planning, life will surprise you. We had planned for me to be back at the wheel long before Chicago, when we assumed the driving would get rough. But suddenly, on a country road that looked as if it would be clear and easy, bad fog came up simultaneously with road construction. There was nothing to do but live through it until there was a safe place to pull off.
8. Handling the unexpected situations well will give you confidence. After fog and road construction, I was more willing to say perhaps it would be OK to think about passing other cars, since that was much easier than what we had already lived through!
9. Take time to enjoy and appreciate progress. I probably told my 16 year old thirty or forty times what a great job I thought she was doing. And I meant it. But I could see that hearing my appreciation built her confidence and she was not annoyed by my repetition.
10. Plan to build on what you’ve learned. Now that we’re home from a highway trip, we’ll begin learning how to drive in town, which involves a whole different set of lessons. But the confidence from the road trip will spill into the local driving and make it easier.