One of the interesting things about learning to play the piano is that, for me as an educator, the learning process becomes more "transparent."

I suppose I don't notice "how I learn" with a lot of the other things I do (like reading journal articles about a topic I don't know as much about - right now I'm planning a side-project on surveying the soil invertebrate population on the prairie restoration site - because it's a mode of learning I've used so long and so much that it's second nature).

One thing I notice is the wisdom of the "work on it some each day." I had this pretty well drilled into me from high school on - if you are taking a difficult class, don't wait until right before the exam to study, do a LITTLE studying each day.

That is also true with practicing. My teacher told me: even if ALL you can practice in one day is 15 minutes, do that. Don't not-practice and then try to make it up on the weekend.

And I see that. Because I see how I progressively get better with each day's practicing. Some days it may be a miniscule, almost-undetectable amount; others, it will be a considerable gain. But the only way to get that is through the reinforcement of working daily.

The other thing I notice is the truth of something I read somewhere, figured made sense, and always tell students about: you learn things best if you have the chance to sleep between sessions of learning. It is as if the pathways solidify during sleep, or something. (Or maybe not solidify, that's probably not the right word. Maybe "strengthen" is better). I can go from barely being able to play a piece one day to being able to play it mostly successfully the next - and that without any practice time or even really THINKING about the piece. It's as if my brain works on it without my paying attention to it.

I assume that is the same way for studying anything.

It is interesting to pay attention to the "meta" of learning something like this. (Or maybe it's just interesting to ME, since I work as a sort of an educator). But I like that a couple of things that I believed to be true about learning seem to be borne out by my experience. (And yes, I know: "anecdote" is not the singular of "data.")

Another thing I notice about practicing, and I think this is why it puts me in a better mood to be able to do it, is that it is one time out of my day when I HAVE to "uni-task."

I know, it's long been said the wave of the future - nay, the only way for us to "adapt" - is to multi-task. To do five things at once. And in my experience, that means doing five things, each more slowly and more poorly than they would be done if I could just stop and devote my full attention to each thing in its rightful order.

I am a poor multi-tasker.

And I know, being able to multi-task is supposedly the hallmark of being female. It is supposedly our genetic legacy from our cavewoman ancestors who had to make sure their babies weren't crawling off a cliff, while simultaneously scanning the horizon for predators, looking for edible leaves and berries, weaving together a new mat of grass for the cave floor, and wondering just WHERE Og was with that giant sloth steak he promised to get?

But I just don't multi-task well. I notice several things when I multi-task:

1. I make more mistakes. I have had to have more assignments and exams re-copied than I care to admit because I was trying to talk to someone on the phone while writing them - or I was toggling back and forth between that and entering grades.

2. I don't work as fast. It seems like the "toggling back and forth" eats up time.

3. It distresses me. I find I am far more stressed out at the end of a time period where I've had to juggle five different things than I am at the end of a time period (even if it takes more time) where I could do each thing, as I said, in its proper order. I think it's because multi-tasking creates a false sense of urgency.

I think a sense of urgency - especially false urgency - is one of the great malaises of our time. The idea that we have to DO something, NOW - that we cannot take time to contemplate and plan - that we have to be busy or at least LOOK busy - that time is money (no, it isn't. Time is more than money. Time is the only thing that the richest man on earth and the lowliest beggar in Mumbai get the exact same amount of each day. Time is the only thing you can't get BACK, even if you spent all the money in the world).

I think it is one of those things - like the drumbeat of bad news stories, that the economy is failing, that we will all be out of work soon, that everything in the air water and food will kill us AFTER giving us some kind of hideous cancer, that we have probably irreversibly poisoned our world and just haven't seen the canary in the mineshaft keel over yet - that if you pay attention to it, it can kill you. Oh yes, I think it can. I think a person who is too driven to be busy - too driven to achieve - can make themselves very sick. I know I've made myself minorly sick by pushing myself to the degree that I ever do.

And so I think we need to be able to do things where we can take a breath and say, "This is the ONLY thing I am going to pay attention to for the next 40 minutes."

In its own way, it is like prayer or meditation. You cannot pray effectively if your mind keeps pinging off on other things. (Though maybe the "you can't multitask" isn't all that true; I've actually prayed while knitting or weeding or doing some other simple repetitive task and found I actually stayed on my thoughts better, and derived a greater sense of peace, than if I was just trying to sit still. And there is also "walking meditation" where you walk a labyrinthine path of inlaid tiles). But at any rate - you have to give your full concentration to it to be effective.

And I think that's the insidiousness of multi-tasking - it fragments our concentration. It, in effect, gives us a sort of ADD. (I wonder how many people who were diagnosed with ADD as adults may have come by it through years of multitasking. I know, it's a neurotransmitter thing, but I can't help but wonder if sometimes behaviors and thought-patterns affect the production and uptake of neurotransmitters).

So it's a relief to be able to sit down and do one thing - and one thing only. And not to have to fear interruption. (I don't work as well in my office as I do at home, because of the constant stream of phone calls, people knocking on my door, noise in the hall...)

I think this is also why I like piecing quilt tops - while I can listen to music while doing it, I really can't do anything else - I can't multitask.

I guess in a couple of ways I tend to run counter to trends. I've said to people that I think in the future the ultimate luxury will NOT being "reachable at all times" (when cell phones were first available and were still a status symbol, being reachable at all times was a mark of an Important Person) but to be able to go somewhere WITHOUT being able to be reached.

And likewise, I think perhaps the hallmark of good time management and someone who does their job well may be someone who doesn't HAVE to multitask; who can plan and do one thing at once without feeling torn in fifteen different directions.

I do think we will have to, at some point, come to a saner pace of life: I don't doubt that the being pushed to be available 24/7 and to extend the workday more and more hours. Oh, I know, in this economic climate people will tell people to do just that - to make themselves "indispensable" by turning themselves into a version of those robots that work on the car assembly lines. But I look at where we're going - a utilitarian world where things are valued based on how they can advance us or how much money they will make us - and it makes me kind of sad.

And not just because two magazines I used to subscribe to have closed down. And a tea room I used to love. And an antiques shop that was one of my favorites in the world.

I just fear a grey uniform future - where everyone is a cog in a machine, and where the concept of doing something for your own amusement or your own edification is seen as perhaps a dangerous aberration.

And while I hate the whole activist-we-are-saving-the-world-through-craft attitude that some people take, I do like to think of my setting aside an hour a day (if I can at all manage that much time) to work on learning to play the piano as my own little quixotic protest against a culture that tells me that the only things worth doing are things that put more money in my pocket or more accolades after my name.

(One of the things I hate about myself: I get the feeling of "You're wasting your life!" on a more or less regular basis. Because I haven't done anything BIG. I think it's almost as damaging to a child to raise them with the expectation that they will do Great Things as it is to tell them they Will Never Amount To Anything, because then that child grows up, and if they don't want to go in for the near-monomania that it takes to do truly Great Things (spending 20 hours a day working on research, for example), then they feel like a failure - and like they are wasting their life. I kind of had to stuff that emotion down a little at the Quammen talk the other night, when, in the introduction the person talked about all the stuff he'd done. And he's not that much older than I am (I think). So I don't know. Part of it is that so much of what I do is intangible - it's not like a book you can point to on a shelf. But sometimes I do wish I had someone to remind me that I'm NOT wasting my life when I get to feeling like I am...)