Girl from Ipanema

In order to have a routine and give myself something to do in the evening besides watching tv, I have been retreating to my bedroom for about an hour each night and work on classical guitar. Although I had been playing acoustic guitar since I was a teenager, I took up the study of classical guitar less than ten years. It was interesting because I had to learn things like reading music and working on timing, although I never got very good at either. Still, it is something I have kept at on and off over the years. If asked to rate myself, I would probably put myself at a low intermediate level which, given the pure number of years since I started learning is probably pretty pathetic but accurately reflects the amount of effort I’ve put into the activity.

When I practice, I do so not so much to make progress as to simply enter a different state of mind. I can feel when I am practicing another, nonverbal side of the brain is kicking in and the verbal side can get a rest. Since I am not very good, practice can be a slow, rather painful process as getting through even a few bars can take hours. So it is almost as if I practice out of a sense of duty more than out of love for the classical guitar: duty to be doing something constructive with my time, a sense that I ought after all these years to make progress on the instrument or at least maintain what little progress I have made. Passion or excitements are not words that come to mind when I think of how to describe my nightly ritual.

All of that changed the other night as the result of a web search. I usually practice in front of the computer screen because there is a wonderful website—learnclassicalguitar.com—that offers great free lessons. I cannot call to mind the precise reason why I decided to do a web search for “Girl from Ipanema.” I know that about ten years ago I saw classical guitarist Christopher Parkinson perform a version of this live, and it blew me away. Hoping to find a version of the song I could play, I was delighted to see a youtube video claiming to give a lesson on the song. Almost immediately I was hooked. For one, it did not look that hard to play, but the level of difficulty made in interesting and required a good deal of effort. Just coordinating the fingering patterns and chords for the first couple of bars took me the rest of the session that night. By that time I was hooked. I was working on the song not for one hour but two or three each evening, and pulling out the guitar in the morning and afternoons just to brush up.

This I thought is what passion is like. This is how you should do everything. When you approach something with this state of mind, everything changes. I’ve done this before with the classical guitar, working for hours on a Gymnopedie #1 by Satie, a piece that is levels above my ability but which I learned simply because I loved the piece. So what I am saying is that it is important to have this kind of passion in all aspects of your life. And it is this lack of passion for my academic work that played a role in my leaving the position. How to get it and how to harness it, however, remains a mystery to me. In the case of the guitar, I could not just have consciously decided that I was going to love Girl From Ipanema. I just loved that song, and without things calling you in that way, you are never going to develop the passion. And this, as I say, is an element beyond our conscious control.

So those things have to be out there and then we have to identify them, which is a whole separate process, because if they are out there and we never find them, well, it is like a lover we never meet. But unless you are out there looking, you will never meet the lover. So you have to be out there looking for things you love, and probably finding a lot of things you don’t love and playing with them anyway, both in lovers and in classical guitar music and in everything. Finally, if it is out there and you identify it, then you must act on that passion, engage it in some meaningful way.

I’m sure this all applies to my life in someway. But right now I’m too busy working on this song to figure that out.

Patti Smith Blues

Well, this isn't going to get posted either but I mighth as well write it up. Listening to Patti Smith talk about her new book, an autobiography of her early years in New York, where she moved when she was just twenty in order to become an artist and her relationship with a then also newly arrived Robert Mapplethorpe, who was also struggling to find his way into the art world, and the struggles they endured and their ultimate successess and his ultimate death. As with the Sonia Sotamayor story, here is someone finding their path in life. Listening to or reading such stories are just depressing these days. There is no other way to put it. The lesson is to find your passion early and follow it. This is precisely what I did not do, and now I must live with the consequences.



Response: Again, I hate to leave a negative thought just hanging there. There was a reason I did not pursue the path I would have listed as my passion, and that is writing, a reason I did not find that courage. And I need to take responsibility for that, as much as some of it was circumcstances beyond my control. It's right now that matters. Right now I would at least admit I took a courageous step and that what follows is up to me. It's also important to point out that not ever path is that of a steady rise. I need to broaden my definition of success. And it has to be one of being true to your own nature more than of following any pre-defined model. Melville, toiling away in obscurity, working on a poet no one will read while he spends his days in some drudgery job. And so it is all now about following that path of truth and not in looking back in regret

RN11210: Prescription for the Soul

I would like to go somewhere to write and run and grow strong. Eat well and breathe clean air. Study Chinese and classical guitar. Do yoga and meditate.



Live in a good place

Keep your mind deep

Treat others well

Stand by your word

Make fair rules

Do the right thing

Work when it's time

--Tao Te Ching, 8

Answer to Phil

I was seated at the bar with a friend of my brother, a good guy. I mean, he works for a living, and he' s heard I've quit my job. And so, after a few drinks he asks, "dude, what's your plan?" And I couldn't answer. So my goal for tonight is to come up with an answer that I could give Phil.

1. The "I am working on a book answer." This one tends to satisfy most people, even myself occasionally. I talk about a book project that involves my spending a year traveling to China, India and Greece. That is not a complete description of the project, but it is accurate enough. I say it involves examining the three great wisdom cultures of the world to see what if anything they have to say to us today. After that I am going to take about six months, write the book and then probably go back to school and get an MSW.

2. The "I am going to travel around the world" answer. I just say, I don't know man. I am just exhausted and need a break. I am just going to travel around the world until I get tired.And then I am going to come back and figure out what I am going to do.

3.The five year plan anwer. I say, for the next five years my plan on teaching one semester in China and then the rest of the year just living somewhere very simply, very cheaply and writing.
4. The Peace Corps answer. I tell him I am biding time until an upcoming Peace Corps assignment and that now I am going to travel around Asia for a while until that comes due in May or June sometime.

Well, those seem to be the options I have come up with.

Sonya Sotaymayor blues

At times, the sense of what a mess I have made of things becomes overwhelming. One of those times was this morning reading (well, listening to on my kindle) to a essay describing the life of a famous public figure. The piece described the person's humble origins, her early success at school, further development at college and professional school and steady rise through a series of professional assignments that led to her current position of power and honor. I am not even sure where to begin to explain the feelings that brought up. It is seeing a life that has proceeded along a steady line, achieving success at each stage and, more importantly with each stage building upon the other. And the result is, the sense of accomplishment of a life's mission. My life has gone in the exact opposite direction. I never achieved much success in my chosen profession and now, cut off from that, there is going to be no long, glorious march.

Another result of this long, steady march to success in a profession is that one develops an interlocking series of acquaintances who can speak your praises, or at least provide recommendations. For a while in my career I was tapped into things. I knew most of the people in the ancient philosophy community and could count on recommendations for a few fellowships and grants. I doubt I could even get anyone to write me a letter of recommendation for a janitor's position right now.

It's a sense of having stepped off the path and being alone and lost. And paralyzed, not knowing what the next move should be. This is not the time to wallow in self-pity, though, and I don't want to sign out tonight on a total negative note. Every one's path is different and not all missions look the same. Emerson somewhere says something about the voyage of a great ship being a series of zig zags and not a straight line. His own life certainly got off the rails with the death of his first wife, throwing everything overboard and heading over for Europe with no idea what would be next for him. Granted, he was a much younger man when all that happened than I am right now, and this is not an insubstantial difference. Nietzsche gives up his university career and spends the rest of his life wandering around Europe. Interesting that these two examples came to mind. They certainly share a similarity: giving everything up, and then what? Well, if I wanted certainty and solidity, I should have stayed where I was. (The Nietzschean idea of amor fati or loving your fate certainly seems relevant here.)

Eat, Pray Love

I may be the only person in the world--well, the only traveller--who hasn't read Eat, Pray, Love. But I did listen to an interview with the author this morning. Part of the reason I have never read it (and at this stage will not read it) was that the concept behind her book was always something I had planned on doing, a sort of travelogue in search of wisdom. In a note on projects I wanted to undertake written more than fifteen years ago I wrote: "A Year in the World in Search of Wisdom" In fact, that is precisely what the plan is for the next year, and so I specifically didn't want to read it in order not to be influenced. But right now, the artifice of the whole thing has me turned off to the project. First, when I compare our titles, I am struck by, well, how artificial/intellectual/unappealing/clunky my own title is: A Wisdom for All Seasons: A Year in Search of Enlightenment. God, "Eat, Pray, Love" is so much more concrete, grounded, real. Mine, too ethereal, disconnected. Like myself. On the other hand (thank God this has finally sunk in from China), mine can be seen as a male version of this, and there is somethint to be said for putting out a male version of this. But despite throwing this bone to myself, my overall feeling about the project this morning is negative. I was going to say, I want to throw up, but we'll leave it at negative.

I also think, to start out with the idea of writing a book about becoming enlightened is presumptuous to say the least. I think the way that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance evolved, which was originally going to be nothing more than an essay, is a more natural approach to take. So there is nothing really wrong with my plan. It's just that I shouldn't think anyone is going to be very interested in reading about the results. Which doesn't mean (a) I am not going to undertake it or (b) write about it. I have to do something, and it's as good a project as I can come up with. Still, I could walk away from it tomorrow

Identify that quote

"Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook."