"38 YEARS TO BANJO GOD"
I had my first banjo lesson of 2014 yesterday. I was thinking about how long I have been taking lessons, which is just over a year now, and just how far I have come. I can actually play a couple old time songs now - or should I say I can massacre a couple old time songs. I am always amazed at those people who an play so well and make it look so easy. Bastards! How do they do it?
As with everything in life, to get good at something you have to practice......a lot! To get really good, to the point of being an expert, you have to be completely obsessive and pretty much practice all the time. In Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers", a terrific read by the way, he boils it down to ten thousand hours of solid practice to master any skill. Gladwell backs up his hypothesis with some very compelling evidence. Obviously some people certainly have some natural aptitude, or what we call talent, for some things, but I think this only avails that person with a small advantage - the rest is simply hard work.
To put this into perspective, let's use banjo as an example. Based on the ten thousand hour rule, if I was to practice 15 minutes a day, 7 days a week, it would take me 109 years to master the banjo.
A half our a day would reduce this to 55 years. One hour a day, or seven hours a week would take 27.5 years. Ten hours per week, 19 years. 20 hours a week, 9.6 years and 40 hours per week,4.8 years.
Holy Crap! Based on these stats, I should be really good by the time I am 90 years old - 38 years from now! Haha! It's gonna be a riot in the home!!
It is a really good thing I love my banjo, but maybe I better ramp up the hours!
I wonder if Janice would mind me taking up the bagpipes..............
“Never Take ANYTHING for Granted” and “Yes! You can teach an Old Dog New Tricks!"
You have all heard the adage “Never take ANYTHING for granted”. Well today I spent the morning having my eyeballs poked and prodded. As an Artist/Architect obviously it would suck big time to loose my vision.
A few months ago I noticed a blurry blind spot in the middle of my right eye, which, as you might expect scared the crap out of me. This is not exactly new, but it is still disconcerting. I first started having vision problems back in my twenties when I got hit at the side of my right eye with a hockey stick. The stick didn’t even hit the eye but the side of the orbital socket. At the time it was no big deal, a simple stitch and scar to add some character. Man was I surprised when over the next 30-60 days I started to get a white cloudy film over my pupil. I had developed a traumatic cataract at the ripe old age of 27. I was totally blind in my right eye.
Two surgeries later, I was implanted with a plastic interocular lens and I was back in business. As for today’s episode, I was lucky. What was a macular edema two months ago, had corrected itself before the specialist had his chance to stick me with another needle in the eye!
The long and the short of it, is that you simply cannot take anything in life for granted.
This takes me to the second part of this post. As a creative type, what would I do if I were to lose my vision? I wouldn’t be much of an Artist/Architect if I could not see! These are questions that we should all be asking ourselves. What if we were to get sick, lose our health, lose a spouse, lose a job. One thing for sure, I wouldn’t be sitting around doing nothing! I’d play banjo!!
I always wanted to learn to play an instrument. Unfortunately it was one of those things that just kept getting put off. Self doubt and negative commentary from others sabotaged any early ventures into music. It’s amazing how many well intentioned people there are out there that are willing to give an opinion on wasting your time on frivolous activities, like wanting to play music! Funny, I heard the same rhetoric when I started my Architecture and Art Careers.
So, I did what I do best, ignored what people around me were saying (including myself) and picked up a guitar at 48 years old, and took some lessons. I was brutal. I spent the better part of the first year trying to do a bar chord. It took me another year to torture my wife with a really bad version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”. But then it happened. It actually started to click. I realized I knew a lot of chords, and I could actually play a song. Then two, three and so on. I still suck, but I pick up the guitar pretty much every day and I pick away. I just play, and lose myself in the music.
It was getting close to my 50th birthday, and for some bizarre reason I wanted to try the banjo. I secretly would check them out at the Ottawa Folklore Centre, too embarrassed and shy to pick one up. Then out of the blue, a few days before my 50th, Janice sends me a YouTube clip of Abigail Washburn, playing “City of Refuge”. I was immediately hooked and I bought myself my first banjo - a half-century present to myself. And here we are, a year and a half later, and as with the guitar, I pick up the banjo every day, and yes, I suck. But I keep at it and I can actually now play some tunes. I am learning frailling or claw hammer style banjo, a style completely different from guitar playing. It is really difficult, well for me anyways, but I love it, and I lose myself in it. Learning to play is a musical meditation.
So if I were to lose my vision, the Accidental Architect would simply have to become the Accidental Musician! Apparently yes, you can teach an old dog new tricks!
So my only word to you tonight, don’t take anything in life for granted, and go play banjo!
