Crushed by enthusiasm
By the time you put up a building like this to meet housing demand, the market may have cooled. (Image by ElasticComputeFarm)
As a music teacher, I used to get a lot of calls from parents who were trying to foster their child’s budding interest in an instrument.
It was often a bit of a dance to figure out how to best support these families. Though a two-year-old might be fascinated by seeing someone play the drums, enrolling that tiny person in formal lessons on the drum set is not necessarily developmentally appropriate. I needed to find a way to convey that without damaging the parent’s eagerness to help their child explore music.
Even with older children, a spark of desire to play a particular instrument can be easily extinguished by an overly enthusiastic response from the adults. Suddenly, a brand-new guitar appears and lessons begin the next day. These lessons may or may not leave space for the child’s own fantasy of what playing the guitar is like. Usually, they do not, and the child’s guitar career ends before it even began.
It reminds me of the way, as an enthusiastic but hasty gardener, I might crush the plants I am trying to stake, or pull up seedlings I planted along with the weeds. In an effort to nurture, I am committing murder.
I’ve done it to myself, too. I’ve spent too much money on a new hobby, leaving me with guilt and resistance instead of the consistent habit I was hoping to build. I’ve spent hours and hours building elaborate systems to help me track an activity rather than actually doing the activity.
My better moments have always been the simple, grounded ones — the equivalent of the baby playing delightedly with wrapping paper or the cardboard box a toy came in instead of the toy itself. Abandoning the expensive piece of exercise equipment to go for a walk outside. Playing hooky from one of my elaborate systems to start a new, scrappy project “off the books.” Trying to do something way beyond my skill level in a particular hobby just for the fun of it.
It’s hard to let go of the sunk costs that make us feel like we should do things “the right way.” And following the proper sequence for something is soothing in theory. But if our attempts to follow through on our weighty commitments or stay the course on a particular program are yielding little, we might get better results if we accept that the fancy racing bike is too intimidating to ride or our degree program is actually too comprehensive. Maybe, for now, we just want to mess around.
A friend recalled how his father used to try to get the most out of the family’s day passes to an amusement park. They would arrive as the gates opened, and then they would stay until closing time even though they had stopped having fun shortly after lunch. They’d grimly ride roller coasters and go down giant slides until everyone was exhausted and miserable. Joyful family memories.
While I’d like to think that the years I spent teaching private music lessons led to a lifelong enjoyment of playing music for my students, I probably had more misses than hits. Ironically, my greatest success as a music teacher was playing music with the students of The Little Middle School every morning before math.
I didn’t offer a ton of direct instruction; mostly, I provided the instruments and the context in which to play them. The students, day by day, were motivated on their own to pursue ukulele, bass, drums, guitar, piano, and singing outside of class. Every day, the “band” got better, and so did the individual players. Many of them had already tried and failed to learn an instrument through traditional music lessons, but the experience of playing regularly with others stimulated their desire to learn and helped them to build momentum and skill in a way that music lessons never could.
It’s wonderful to have support and encouragement from the people around you. It’s invaluable to have the resources to obtain the necessary equipment to pursue your passions. But when it comes down to it, many of us need space to learn and grow. If we already have everything, there’s nothing to desire. If we have more than we want, we lose our appetite. We’ve got to have a little room to keep playing and exploring. When we combine that with the right amount of guidance at the right time, we will go far.