At play in the fields of flow
The other night I was joined by a couple of old friends of mine – Randy Vic and Dave Marshall – and together we played jigs and reels for a room full of contradancers here on Bowen Island. I have played with these guys for coming on ten years now and we know each other so well that we hardly need to speak to one another when we’re playing. Tune names are called out with a couple of syllables – “priest” for The Musical Priest, “dingle” for the Humours of Dingle – and we manage to switch tunes or end sets with a simple glance, or a tow raised a little from the floor. When we play we are very much in the groove, locked into flow with one another.
It is this ability, to get into a groove, that makes someone a musician. One can have perfect technique on an instrument but what distinguishes a technician from a musician is that ability to surrender oneself to the flow of the music Music is not about making notes, it is about marking time, and to mark time one needs to have an intimate connection with its passing.
After we played we were having a beer in our local pub and we struck up a conversation with friends Brad and Julie Ovenell-Carter. Julie is writer and comes from a family of talented classical musicians. Brad is a chef and a teacher and has taught himself bodhran and god knows how many other instruments. At one point, as we talked about how important flow experiences were, and the social benefits of making music together, Julie asked the question “how do we teach children music?”
My own response was to recoil from the question. I am a self-taught musician. The two instruments I did take lessons on – oboe and clarinet – are not instruments I play to this day. Instead I play Irish flute, tin whistle, guitar, didgeridoo and a little piano. I also sing. All of these instruments I have learned traditionally, that is from teaching myself and having others show me a few things. What drove me to learn these instruments was not a desire to master them, but rather a strong need to express myself musically.
In the main, when we “teach” music, we are actually drilling technique into learners. Practice your scales, learn your theory, rehearse your pieces. The standard model drives a desire to perfect the instrument after which you can then make music. But this leads to a tight, tight corner. At what point do you actually get perfect? When can you start to make music?
When I was being taught how to play clarinet, the incessant practice and denial of music making was dreary. After working for 15 minutes I would so tire of scales, that I would switch to guitar and PLAY. Twenty years later, I picked up a clarinet at a friend’s house one night and started playing, and found that I could have fun with it, but only because I had forgotten all that technical stuff and learned in the interim the emotional language of music.
I am never going to be the world’s best flute player. But I play well enough that I derive great pleasure from being able to make music with others, and I can play all night without getting tired. I never practice – I am always playing. If I pick up the flute, it’s because there is a new tune to learn or something I want to try. If it’s not fun, it doesn’t happen.
I think there are parallels with this medium, with blogging. We can teach kids to write, but where do we teach them to play with narrative, to put words together and invent new kinds of sentences, to try out ideas in the public eye by crafting them into essays and sharing them with others? Where in the lives of our kids, and ourselves, do we learn how to invite conversation and create the mistakes from which we learn?
For me it is not the skill of stringing together sentences that will propel us forward, but a competency in the art of conversation. We need more and more venues in which to practice the inner arts of thinking, writing and conversing with one another. People spend 12 or 13 years in school “learning to write” and so few of them come out of it with any inclination to do so or deriving any pleasure from the activity. Why? It is because we demean playing.
Blogging and more real forms of conversation like Open Space Technology meetings, World Cafes and dialogues (not top mention the serendipity of third places – bars and cafes and other places) invite us to develop that capacity of getting in the groove with one another. We trip on each other’s mistakes, learn from surprising insights, deeply connect with each other’s ideas. It is like a jazz musician who finds a new direction in an error just made, who learns licks and riffs from her friends on the fly and who explores the powerful sense of marking time closely and meaningfully with her mates.
Let us not worry about grammar and proper punctuation. Since we were babies we have always had the capacity to acquire the tools we need to express ourselves. No one sat down and taught us how to speak or to walk. We learned it because we had a powerful drive to speak and move. Now we can write and dance and run and speak with one another. The wisdom of babies is that they do exactly what they need to to become connected with others.
Let us instead practice playing together with what we have right now – the imperfect, the blemished, the half understood. Let’s turn to that deeply human ability to experience flow with one another. Let us celebrate the invitation of media like music and writing and conversation to connect us together in the service of evolution and humanity.
I think if we can do this and let go of our fears, the real innovation springs up around us. We cannot ignore it. Passion for life unfolds from our engagement and our participation in the emerging conversation becomes irrepressible.
I don’t pretend that I know the answer, but that’s my best guess right now. Of course, I’m open to your thoughts and notions on this too, because who knows where that takes us?
