Journal · Practice
Choose the Right Leader for Your Path
One day passionate, the next distracted — the psyche is a rollercoaster, and serious study asks for consistency. The question is who gets the keys.
Serious study asks for a steadiness the daily self can’t promise. The question is who holds the keys.
As humans wanting to study music, we face an inherent conflict. On one side, a serious musical education wants long-term consistency — consistency with our practice ceremony, with our passion, with our creativity, with our energy. On the other side, as humans, we have a built-in chaotic psychological structure that generates ups and downs in all of the above. One day we feel passionate; the next we feel sad. One day we feel hopeful and inspired, and the day after we are angry at something and distracted. An ongoing rollercoaster that is anything but consistent.
So what do you do?
Option one: you go with the rollercoaster, following your daily inner voice. Practice when you want to; don’t when you don’t feel like it. This is a very legitimate way to address the problem — as long as you acknowledge the price you will pay in the long run.
Every musical skill demands a lot of playing time. Every finger roll, every independence ability, every sound — every single aspect of the game demands mileage, and some of them demand a certain intensity: a loaded, focused stretch of playing a lot. If you practice a certain stroke or phrase for fourteen days in a row, you have a much, much higher chance of improving on that element than if you practice a total of fourteen isolated days scattered over a year. The same amount of practice time — but the daily meeting with the element creates a faster evolution. Fourteen scattered days are fourteen first meetings; fourteen days in a row become a relationship. So when you filter out every day that you don’t feel like playing, for whatever reason, you make the path much, much longer — and sometimes you prevent it from ever becoming a reality at all.
Option two: you realize that your psychological thought-generator is not to be trusted with the long term — simply because of its nature, and the nature of your dream. Its nature is to change: it hands down a different verdict every morning. Your dream’s nature is long — it is measured in years, not in moods. A voice that changes its mind daily cannot be the one navigating a path that takes years to walk.
So you recognize that your vision of playing the drum might be deeper than the shallow layers of your psyche — the ones that decide whether today you feel happy, sad, or angry; inspired or uninspired; motivated, or disconnected from the instrument — and you make a choice from a deeper, more grounded place, giving it the keys to navigate your daily choices. You commit to your dream from a deeper place.
What does that mean, practically? It means you arrive at your practice ceremony even when you don’t feel like it. It means you sit with the drum for an hour, or a day, while feeling frustrated and uninspired. It means your routine is not shaped by your daily emotions anymore — the question do I feel like it today? quietly stops being the question.
There is also something to hold while you sit there uninspired: the vision of the future musician you want to be — the vision of how it will feel to play from a deeper level of skill. You are not only practicing the phrase in front of you; you are practicing towards that person.
And in those hours of true commitment, a very important, deep bond is being created — between you and music, between yourself and your dream. Anyone can play on the inspired days; the rollercoaster will hand you plenty of those, too. But these sessions — the ones you showed up for anyway — might be the most meaningful of all, because they are the expression of a person determined to shape his own life.
It might feel counterintuitive. We are doing art! How can one be disconnected from himself? This is blasphemy!
To that, I say only this —
If you confuse your daily mental drama with your true self, you have a very important, life-changing lesson waiting on your doorstep.
Of course — if the daily mental activity resists the path you are taking, day after day after day, for a long period of time, then you should start asking serious questions about your choice. Often, though, the resistance proves to be very temporary.
The rollercoaster will keep rolling either way. Commit from the deeper place — and let it hold the keys.
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Live online lessons across four instruments. Keep reading: The Creative Ceremony · Discipline Is a Skill · Same Destination, Different Paths