Creature of Habit

Yesterday, I was taking a private lesson in waltz from Roberta, one of our dance coaches for the ballroom team. She asked me when I was going to take another lesson, (not until the end of July) and she said that she had to be careful about what she told us, because it's easy to build bad habits in 3 weeks. You can't get a bad habit in just a week, she said. But it's a good thing that we do build habits, because otherwise, what's the point in practicing?

That's what practicing is. Building habits.

It's the same with piano. When I finally learned how to practice, (took me 9 years), I realized that it's not really about what I know in my head. I can know what a piece is supposed to sound like in every detail - what the notes are and how loud to play them, where the phrases begin and end, how to pedal - but that didn't mean that I could play it the way I heard it in my head. The majority of my time is spent training my fingers to do what I want them to do. Patience, young grasshopper. In dance, it's not just fingers anymore. I have to train my whole body, and along the way, discover muscles that I never knew existed. Movements that weren't comfortable become comfortable with practice; they become habitual. If you don't play a sport or play music, you can see this when you type on your keyboard. I bet you can type common words much more quickly than uncommon words, and I bet your name comes most easily.

This happens with everything. Handwriting, for example. When I was little, I wanted my f's to look like Dumbledore's, and so I trained myself to write them that way. People practice their signatures. The way you see things can be trained, too. You can train yourself to see a clean room as relaxing, or it might seem very uptight, depending on what you're used to. You can train yourself to look at the world like you're looking through a camera, and just see photos everywhere. You can also prevent yourself from building habits. When I go out to a restaurant or to get ice cream, I like to get something different every time. That way, I don't become a "creature of habit," and miss out on exciting new things. But you don't want to be discovering exciting new things when you're performing a piece of music!

I want to train my body to do the things I want it to do: to waltz, or to play a piece, or to type. But I also want to train myself to be the kind of person I want to be. If I keep my apartment clean, hopefully, eventually, I won't feel comfortable in a messy room anymore, and then cleaning won't be so difficult for me. I want to train myself to study things that I'm not interested in, so I can do what needs to be done. I don't watch TV, but maybe I can still train myself toward more productive ways to procrastinate. Like cleaning, maybe?