So much happens when you are teaching, learning, and living the arts! Here are three quick “snapshots” from recent days, each followed by a “focus” – a new clarity – which, I hope, will help you see your artistic life with refreshed eyes.

  1. Does it make you practice?

“How did you get on this week? Did you get a chance to practice?” I asked one of my piano students, a lovely woman in her 50’s. She hung her head. “No,” she mumbled. “I just got busy. I’m really sorry.”

She’s madly in love with the music and lately she has made such wonderful leaps forwards in her playing, so this downtrodden aspect is the last thing I want to inspire in her. “No worries at all, OK?” I told her. “Music is a wonderful addition to your life – never a source of worry or anxiety.”

She looked up with something like hope in her eyes. “But the last teacher used to get so mad about that and I used to feel so guilty.”

“Hmmm,” I thought for a moment. “Did that make you want to practice more?”

She looked surprised. “Well,” pause. “No.”

How we laughed then!

Focus: Fear and shame are the worst reasons to do anything. The best reason to practice – to play, really – is because it brings joy to your life. If we’re not practicing and we really want to, our question is: How can I make this joyful?

  1. Scramble those eggs!

I love to help my students do things they never thought they could do. Often, when they’ve mastered a skill with one hand, and then the other, I’ll ask them, “Are you ready for some scrambled eggs?” This is a signal that I’m going to ask them to do the musical equivalent of rubbing their stomach and patting their head. That means that there WILL be chaos, mistakes, stumbling, start-overs, flushed faces, and general mayhem. And that is a very, very good thing when it comes to learning and growing.

Here’s an example. A very dear Bardic Academy student wrote a poem entitled, “I Encountered the Snow.” Then, I asked her to improvise on the harp as I read the poem aloud. The result gave us both lovely shivers. But I knew that wasn’t as far as she could go and so I asked, “Can I make you scramble the eggs now?” And, willing and passionate student that she is, she agreed.

“Now I want YOU to read the poem – here, I’ll hold it up – while you improvise on the harp.”

Her eyes widened and she said, “I don’t know if I can do those things at the same time.”

Yoda-like, I answered, “Try.”

And of course, she did it beautifully and was absolutely stunned by what she’d done. “That’s bardic!” she exclaimed. “That’s like the old bards of Ireland.”

“Precisely!” I hollered in my excitement.

Focus: You can do more than you think you can do, especially when you are willing to scramble the eggs.  That can mean working at a different speed, or letting two hands do different things, or engaging two separate faculties at the same time (speech/reading and music/improvising), or anything else that feels like a stretch. Just remember that there WILL be mess and chaos. But also remember that we were born to stretch like this, and so there will also be fun, exhilaration, and laughter!

  1. Scales as security-blanket

Here’s Kate, anxious over some trifle, looking at her calendar, peering at her to-do list, tempted to log onto Facebook or check her email just to have a “task” to do, and not really breathing deeply or much at all.

She gets up from her chair and marches over to Draíocht Dubh, her baby grand, and starts playing scales. The tension drains out of her face and is replaced by an expression of engaged relaxation. Ah!

Focus: There are moments – plenty of them – when I just don’t know what to do. That is not to say that there is nothing TO do. Au contraire! There is always so much to do as I build my business and create my life that I sometimes short-circuit and can’t think clearly enough to decide what, in this moment, is most important. Perhaps it is like that for you, too, sometimes?

In those moments, I have two choices: check Facebook or practice scales. OK – I’m exaggerating! But you get the point. I can either do something fairly mindless to cover the anxiety of not knowing what to focus on (and something which leaves me, on the other side, pretty much in the same shape as when I began), or I can do something that without fail calms my mind and brings me great satisfaction.

That’s my default lately: when in doubt, play scales.

Adapt this for yourself. Make a quick sketch while you calm down. Sing a few verses. Pick up your journal. Write a haiku. Dance. Whatever is easy and automatic, whatever can be done without much thought or choice, do that.

Let’s make art the default activity.