Zen and the Art of Bass Guitar Riffs
Or, How Not to Break Your Neck Surfing in Maui
Drill, Baby, Drill!
When learning a new skill, you typically have to do lots of boring stuff before you can do the fun stuff. We all know this — we’re told this all our lives, starting when we’re small children.
Practice your scales on the piano before you try to play real songs. Practice your tennis forehand swing; make sure you’re holding the racquet correctly; adjust your grip. Practice your multiplication tables. (Do kids still do those?)
Run wind sprints, lift weights and hit the practice dummies before you start planning your NFL career.
Drills. Stretches. Kata. Verb conjugations. Show me a favorite sport, musical instrument, martial art, or academic discipline and I’ll show you a potentially “tedious” preparation for it.
Some of us hate practice; most of us learn to accept it, on our way to becoming good — or at least halfway decent — at something we want to do. Some are pushed by parents or coaches to do the drills. The best of any field — think Serena Williams or Yo-Yo Ma — found an inner drive that motivated them to put in the “10,000 hours” (and then some).
Over the course of my roughly five decades, I’ve learned the hard way that while momentary exuberance, brief bursts of talent, and sheer stupid physical courage are great, they’re no substitute for actually knowing what the hell you’re doing. And knowing what you’re doing comes from PRACTICE.
I like the feeling of mastering something, even a little bit. We all do. Parallel skiing down a black diamond slope. Nailing the main bass riff in a kick-ass song. It’s only recently, however, that I’ve come to appreciate and embrace the actual process of getting better at something.
Trying to Enjoy the Journey (“Are We There Yet?!”)
Enjoying the journey, not just the destination, never came easy for me. Attention Deficit Syndrome (“off the charts”, according to one diagnosis). “Novelty-seeking gene”. “Adrenalin junkie”. You get the idea.
Since I was young, I always wanted to be the kind of person who practiced meditation, who mastered the art of centering oneself in peaceful, calm bliss…but I never seemed to get around to actually doing it. I was like the person who talks about dieting all the time but somehow just won’t put down the package of Double-Stuf Oreos™.
I started to read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” several times, but mostly skipped around looking for the “good parts”. In retrospect, I would have benefited greatly from the lessons that author Robert Pirsig was trying to impart….
“How Many Emergency Rooms Must a Man Go Through…?”
Growing up in the suburbs of New York City, I didn’t do a lot of surfing. So it would be crazy to go from a couple boogie-board experiences in La Jolla and Santa Cruz to facing the monster waves off the north shore of Maui, swelled by El Niño, right? Right. That became crystal clear to me as the paramedics strapped me to the gurney and loaded me into the ambulance headed for Maui Central Hospital.
And then there was the scuba diving incident — as in nearly every fatal diving accident or plane crash, the result of multiple cascading failures, including the failure to adequately plan and prepare. (Luckily, nobody died or was too irreparably injured).
And then there’s the mountain bike… “PLEASE don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone”, my lovely wife now warns me every time she leaves town for a couple of days.
Of course, not every outcome of failure to practice and prepare is life-threatening. Some are just vaguely sad and embarassing — like my tennis serve. There has to be a better way.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
— Usually attributed to Aristotle, but see here….
So we know that practice makes perfect; or at least, passable. The authors and readers of all those “good habits” books remind us of this. But does it always have to feel so hard, so tedious??
Wu Wei — Effortless Practice
The ancient Chinese phrase Wu Wei (無為) is sometimes translated as “inexertion”, or “effortless action”. It’s an important concept in Taoism that many westerners also connect to the modern psychological notion of “flow state” — of being “in the zone”.
The protagonist of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” might describe it as appreciating the inherent “quality” of an action or a practice, such as cleaning your caurbeurator, instead of rushing through it grudgingly or skipping it entirely.
When you’re in the wu wei state, you’re not running just to get somewhere, to improve your 5K time, or to lose weight. You’re running in order to run. For the sheer existential pleasure of it. You practice your Karate side-kick in order to practice your Karate side-kick. Or your major and minor scales. Or your French verb conjugations. You recognize, appreciate and immerse yourself in the elegance and beauty — the quality — of the act itself. If you can achieve this, then hours pass like mere minutes, and skills improve themselves.
A (real) surfer might say: “You don’t fight the wave; you don’t master the wave; you join the wave. You become the wave.” (And you don’t start surfing by “joining” a 12-footer as a beginner, with no lifeguard around and in hazardous waters you haven’t surfed before!)
The truth and power of this concept hit me one day recently when practicing my bass, as I started to rush through a practice drill on arpeggiating “seventh” scales, hoping to get it over with soon so I could go back to playing fun riffs from my favorite songs. C Maj7…A min7…D min7…G7… Again. And again. A little faster. Again. A little smoother. Again, with a slightly better tone...
And suddenly I heard beauty. Elegance. Deep harmonies, spread out over time through these arpeggios and chord transitions. I actually liked playing this little étude! This and similar practices now very often strike me as pleasurable experiences in themselves; as pleasant periods of respite for the mind from a day’s work and worries.
And, of course, once I actually began to learn scales, chords and chord transitions, I can’t help but hear them everywhere, including in my favorite songs.
But a well-played musical scale or étude has an elegance all its own — irrespective of its utility in building towards “bigger and better things”. The same holds for a well-executed football play, turn of phrase, mathematical derivation, or Python code snippet.
Finding Ekstasis — Ecstasy, Joy — in the Everyday
Karen Armstrong, a prolific chronicler of religious traditions, relates the wisdom of an ancient Taoist philosopher:
“The Book of Zhuangzi,” written in the fourth century B.C., which also enables the reader to become aware of the Tao, the sacred reality that permeates every aspect of life. Zhuangzi’s style is energetic, ebullient, bracing, humorous and accessible. The secret, he explains, is to let ourselves go, laying aside the ego that we cherish so diligently. We do this not by abstruse meditation; instead, we must focus on simple tasks so thoroughly and wholeheartedly that we forget ourselves and allow the qi, the sacred force that permeates the whole of reality, to take over. His heroes are not daunting, solitary mystics. Instead, Zhuangzi introduces us to ordinary people engaged in humdrum tasks who lose themselves so completely in their work that, without any great drama, they experience ekstasis.
Finding ekstasis in the mundane, in the details, in a daily or weekly practice seems to me to be the resolution to the fundamental tension between the Classical and the Romantic ideals as posed by author Robert Pirsig in “Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintanence”. For it allows one to respect the deep structure and knowledge underlying and supporting our technological civilization while finding spontaneity and freedom in the flow state. Once you’ve actually mastered the fundamentals — the scales and chords, the basic blocking and tackling — you can riff and improvise with the best of them. Having absorbed the knowledge of the ancient masters, you can finally, fully express your true self.
So I play my scales, to play my scales. I ride my bike to ride my bike. I lift weights to lift weights. I learn Arabic verbs to learn Arabic verbs. Why do I (mostly) “get it” now? Well, I’m older — I’ve calmed down, I suppose. Maybe my neurochemistry has shifted a bit. Or maybe it’s the years I’ve spent reading books and watching videos on mindfulness, Buddhism and so forth. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s absolutely no chance of my ever getting REALLY good (like, Motown good, Olympics good) at my music, biking, etc. So that — unlike my academic or business pursuits, where some external metric of “success” was often a driving goal — I can finally, simply, enjoy the process. Maybe it’s a conscious choice to be more mindful, more grateful. Whatever. I spend more of my time now in the Now, in the Zone. I like it here.
