Moving Beyond Cheetos
Sitting with the boring present
This week I am thinking about the lightness. It’s not easy to let go of the heavy burden we put on ourselves, but the ideal state is one without worry. Almost as if you could have a zero-tolerance policy for worry.
You will never be able to shake the jitters that accompany day-to-day life, but you can accept them for what they are, various forms of disturbances that come and go like patrons in a bar.
At the end of the day, which is your life, the bar will be cleared out. The tables will be wiped down and the chairs will be put up. No annoyances will persist beyond this point.
Take the time to clear the bar out of those unruly patrons while you’re still here to enjoy it.
I was behind on my music practice this week. That’s never a good feeling but I learned a lot from it. These lessons are obvious, but they’re easy to forget when real life happens.
If you procrastinate, you have sapped yourself of time. This leads to panicked practice sessions where little will get accomplished. I know this is a given but it’s where the problem starts.
To get around this, set your standards 80% lower than what your hungry ego had first set out for you. Instead of a page of music, sometimes you can only do 2-4 bars of that page. Then you have less reason to procrastinate and you have a reasonable goal when you sit down to work.
Working on just those 2-4 bars for the entire session will do you more good than the alternative that I’ve already outlined.
Finally, we have to play the piece much slower than we want to. This is where things start to feel rote because we hear music at double the speed but we have to sit with this uncomfortable pace.
For this reason, learning music or any craft will grant you the gift of mindfulness in work that can only be advertised by venture-backed wellness startups but never experienced first-hand.
It can be easy to stare into a screen and start want things. Status and objects. But in music we are shown that true growth is only achieved through the boring present moment.
This is not to say music is a form of torture, and that’s where play comes in. A practice session must be book-ended with play. You continually work on a repertoire so that your identity as a musician is not one of someone who does rote repetitions every day.
However, from the perspective of shaping the mind, working through the boring present moment can feel therapeutic once you unlock the puzzle of a piece of music and it starts to sing.
The resistance is in everything we work on, because our default mode is to sit on the couch and eat Cheetos. These are times when you learn to move beyond Cheetos and into a new realm. I imagine it should apply to many of life’s other challenges involving motivation and finishing things.
Music Recommendation: McCoy Tyner
This piece caught my ear this week. Going in for a jazz recommendation. I always enjoy McCoy Tyner but what I heard on this one was a cool filtered bass sound.
Enjoy the rest of your long weekend if you’re also here in Canada!
Plenty of bagels to go around…
Elliott
p.s. A post-it note to Finish Stuff
Great piece, Elliott! Time for me to go practice - and just focus on a bar or two at a time!