Glenda Burgess's Blog, page 30

Secret Things

Let us look for secret things
somewhere in the world,
on the blue shore of silence
or where the storm has passed,
rampaging like a train.
There the faint signs are left,
coins of time and water,
debris, celestial ash
and the irreplaceable rapture
of sharing in the labour
of solitude and the sand.
- from "Forget About Me," Pablo Neruda

I found myself dragging into my study this morning, deeply missing the recent vacation en plein air experience of working on my writing in the morning sun on the deck, or down on the dock by the cold lapping lake waters. Something expands the horizons within the mind when you work outdoors, within nature. Different rhythms of creative energy occur; the thermostat of the soul re-calibrates, relaxes the body. The jazz-like syncopation of nature's backup singers catch our ear - the dragon fly, jumping fish, bird cry - the melodies of the world around us. Obversely, something distinctly cramped and confining occurs returning to the four walls of an office: the fixed boundaries of space and vision, the persistent humming of tech, the edges of a geometry designed for efficiency.

It took great discipline to walk in my study, sit down, and begin to work this week. Just as it took discipline to lace up my running shoes this morning and hit the city streets after the freedom of flying down lakeside trails. Striking pavement, I still feel earth, soft underfoot with hot dust and pine needles. The sudden cool silk against skin slipping through patches of deep dappled shade, charged with joy at the many unexpected natural vistas. The pastoral song and the city beat. Somehow I have to move between the two, without losing either creative focus or the inner furnace of steadily-stoked energy that fuels the life I lead and the work I do.

Perhaps it is enough to give space to the transition. To appreciate the small pine cone on the branch of wrapped horsehair moss and love that it now sits on my desk. To contemplate, as Neruda writes, the "blue shores of silence" for the many small reminders of secret things.

Friendship

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends,
Mmm, gonna try with a little help from my friends...
Yes I get by with a little help from my friends,
with a little help from my friends...

- from "I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends," The Beatles


Recently we have been up at the lake in the panhandle of North Idaho, not far from the Canadian border. We have done our usual favorite things - swim, hike, run the trails, pick huckleberries, read and relax under the pine trees. But midweek in our vacation, my daughter, 23, drove the 100 or so miles back into town to support a friend of hers she has stayed close with since high school who was undergoing an unexpected surgery. During the time she was gone, I reflected on the strength of their friendship: that her friend even confided in my daughter about her upcoming surgery, that my daughter immediately made plans to be there for the early morning procedure, to be with the family, and sustain her friend with her simple presence. They are both remarkable young women studying in the life sciences. I paid quiet attention, watching the way my daughter marshaled her resources, worked family professional contacts at the hospital to find the perfect way to support her friend and her family. Her determination to rise early, make the drive through the mountains alone, wait with the family and help with the medical debriefing and explanations, to be with her friend post op. These are the characteristics of a mature and responsive adult. A person who cares.

I think one of the gifts of any youthful friendship that grows and endures, lies in the exposure to adult decision-making that accompanies any life journey. From confronting experiences that require understanding, tolerance, and forgiveness, weathering confusion or disagreement, to believing in the best of one another, accepting the distortions and complications of time, dating and marriage, distance... Young people who develop close attachments experience the challenges and rewards of adulthood in the companionship of that very same friendship. I do not personally know how my daughter's friend feels about her presence with her at the hospital, but I know from talking to my daughter that she experienced a profound awareness of herself and her friend, that even young as they are, they nonetheless live in the shadow of mortality, must endure the angst of waiting through the unknown, seek to optimize the power of information, skill, and in this case medicine, and lean on faith and one another. I think the gift of youthful friendships is that they become the pillars of a much older, weathered wisdom.

We love and learn together...with a "little help from our friends."

Exits

Really, Claire thought, some exits you needed to practice ahead of time.
- Erica Bauermeister, THE SCHOOL OF ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS

It is an uncanny paradox, that we know we are ready for change before we actually make the shift and alter our lives. Our inner selves quietly rehearse an exit that our brains are not yet fully aware we plan to follow through on. Form follows function? Perhaps. Maybe we are just a wave or two behind ourselves, one part of ourselves leading the other. Gently, or not: sometimes it's a kick in the butt. Change this now, or else.

I have been following the inner struggles of a good friend, a woman who has circled around the same dilemma for years. Her pattern has always been to take on a new resolve, remake herself, celebrate the new exciting person she has become, yet doubt creeps in, confidence is lost, she falls back into that old previous rut, and the cycle begins anew. Only as most of us have discovered, the falls get steadily harder, the rut deeper, the cynicism and self-doubt grow with every single time we fail to believe in ourselves. I told her recently as she touched on the frustrations of her misery, her struggle evident in her voice, that I will "always come and find her." Dig deep, listen, reflect the truth. Regardless of the number of rise and falls life drags us through, I believe in the practice of exits. That someday, somehow, we WILL step free of what limits us. That we shall genuinely, simply, and purely release and forever redefine. The personal paradox between reality and desire changes when we suddenly see what the truth of our self truly is.

I think my friend is about done with "practice." I sense in her a momentum, grounded in a growing awareness, that for her this is all as simple as letting go of the doubt. That ending the cycle of attempt and stumble lies on the other side of a clean decision. The decision, as our old pal Yoda put it, to "Do. There is no try." I am excited to see where her next run at her future, her own heroic Olympic attempt at a personal best record, takes her.

I think this time she will fly.

A City

And where
there was chaos
it was graven in strokes of righteous angularity:
bolus of a city inscribed by giant needles,
nexus of highways, tangle of vectors on crumpled papyrus,
power lines across the pine forest, fate line
engraved in the lithosphere
of the palm...
- from A City in the Clouds, Campbell McGrath

This weekend, my daughter, 23, and I, loaded her red Jeep with as much of her future life as we could stuff in and drove the nearly 300 miles from Spokane to Seattle. She is beginning her first year as a medical student at the University of Washington Medical School. Kate is setting up shop near the U District with a new roommate in a modest two bedroom apartment- in the words of Campbell McGrath, "A new land, a new sea. A new world. A city." Her home for the next four years has as it's main advantage, proximity to the medical school; and its main attraction, a balcony set within a canopy of maple trees. We are nothing, my children and I, if not people of the trees.

An interesting paradox, new beginnings. My daughter left a small, tightly-knit east coast city, New Haven, for a west coast life in Seattle, a sprawling basin of twinkling lights nestled deep in the steep pine forests above Puget Sound. A shift in cultures, geography, climate... And a marked new chapter in her life. The process of moving in and furnishing a small space efficiently and inexpensively - after all, funding this professional education is her nickel - immediately and inevitably meant navigating the Renton Ikea warehouse, and tools in hand, cross-legged on the floor of an empty apartment, building assembly furniture channeling all the inspiration available from memories of childhood Lego builds with her younger brother. We took a break for margaritas and fresh Mex, basking in the warm sun dockside on the waterfront at a laid-back bistro on the Montlake Cut. Sweaty, fatigued, bemused, I gazed on the face of the happy adult young woman opposite me and realized my daughter was under full sail: out on open waters, underway toward a future chosen by her, earned by her, and solely in her hands.

It is one very special experience to raise a child; to be given the spiritual and physical fiduciary trust and responsibility to nurture another's unformed body and soul. It is another blessing entirely to see that child, grown, step from the protective circle of your arms and into the world with confidence and commitment. I raised my glass. I toasted to her future. I let go the child. Released the burdens and privileges of decades of guidance and care and accepted the new-found graces of friendship, pride, and gratitude.

From an end, a beginning. A new land, a new sea. A city. A life.

What Is Beautiful

To all you Romantics...
Hold on to this one, friends. Let this poem resonate, listen. Close your eyes.
"A dark voice can curl around the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishness..."

NIGHTCLUB
by Billy Collins

You are so beautiful and I am a fool
to be in love with you
is a theme that keeps coming up
in songs and poems.
There seems to be no room for variation.
I have never heard anyone sing
I am so beautiful
and you are a fool to be in love with me,
even though this notion has surely
crossed the minds of women and men alike.
You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool
is another one you don't hear.
Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.
That one you will never hear, guaranteed.

For no particular reason this afternoon
I am listening to Johnny Hartman
whose dark voice can curl around
the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishness
like no one else's can.
It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette
someone left burning on a baby grand piano
around three o'clock in the morning;
smoke that billows up into the bright lights
while out there in the darkness
some of the beautiful fools have gathered
around little tables to listen,
some with their eyes closed,
others leaning forward into the music
as if it were holding them up,
or twirling the loose ice in a glass,
slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.

Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,
borne beyond midnight,
that has no desire to go home,
especially now when everyone in the room
is watching the large man with the tenor sax
that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.
He moves forward to the edge of the stage
and hands the instrument down to me
and nods that I should play.
So I put the mouthpiece to my lips
and blow into it with all my living breath.
We are all so foolish,
my long bebop solo begins by saying,
so damn foolish
we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

The Path to Super Good

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is a triumph of some enthusiasm.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

This last week I've been thinking and writing about Daniel Coyle's engaging and well researched book, The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How. Emerson's quote headlines a chapter in Coyle's book that addresses what motivates us to want to be great in the first place. Why did Roger Bannister break the four minute mile? And how did his seemingly impossible accomplishment fuel subsequent athletes to feats of equal or better time? While the examples are many, the finding Coyle arrives at is this: Where deep practice is a cool, conscious act (that necessary ten thousand hours of practice/ten years), ignition is a hot, mysterious burst. An awakening, he calls it. Our brains are organized to look for terrifically good uses of available focus and energy. Primal survival cues also leap-frog learning, seeking inspiration from copy-cat "Ah-ha!" moments (If he can do it, so can I!). The right mentoring, supportive environment, opportunity or impetus, and suddenly we are committing ourselves to a goal for the long haul.

One section of Daniel Coyle's research that I found personally fascinating (well yes, I'm the target subgroup), were the links between cognition and aging. The continual proof in the data of that old refrain: use it or lose it. It's simple, according to UCLA neurologist and researcher George Bartzokis, whom Coyle quotes extensively: "The myelin starts to split apart with age. This is why every old person you've ever met in your life moves more slowly that they did when they were younger. Their muscles haven't changed, but the speed of the impulses they can send to them has changed, because myelin gets old." No wonder, I thought reading this. It's a fact I run slower these days. My myelin is aging along with my knees.

But not so fast. It's a balance of natural entropy and regeneration, apparently. Bartzokis continues, "You must remember the myelin is alive, always being generated and degenerating, like a war. When we are younger, we build myelin easily. As we age, the overall balance shifts toward degeneration, but we can keep adding myelin. Even when the myelin is breaking up, we can still build it, right to the end of our lives." (I'll keep lacing up those running shoes.) Situations in which people are forced to adapt and attune themselves to new challenges (i.e., make errors, pay attention, deep practice) tend to increase cognitive reserve. Daniel Coyle concludes that "use it and get more of it," is what we need to remember as we age.

Finally, how do we raise motivated children and encourage budding talent? Coyle turns to psychologist Carol Dweck, who studies motivation. Her advice is distilled into two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort. The author's final observation in The Talent Code touches on the essential unique mystery of our brains, "In the whorls of myelin resides a person's secret history, the flow of interactions and influences that make up a life..." To be the best you can be? Embrace your passion, anchor your faith in the knowledge that failure is the path forward, and practice your way to "super good."

The Rage to Master

Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code credits psychologist Ellen Winner with the phrase "the rage to master" as a description of the focus and intensity that sets some of us apart from others in the development of performance and skill. (He makes the point that if you have to ask if your child possesses the rage to master, they don't.) Research clearly shows, even in the case of well known prodigies, that possessing a high level of skill - mastery - is not accidental. Expertise is not strictly a matter of nature vs. nurture, or because some of us fell on the right side of the "genius gene." (There is no such gene.) Some of us just want total domination more than others. Expertise is defined by Coyle as "deep practice" learning broken into three parts - chunk it up, repeat it, learn to feel it.

The concepts are simple and logical: "Chunk it up" is a strategy for mastery of technique undertaken by breaking a subject into concrete, defined, manageable chunks of new learning, sometimes broken down to the most minute levels (e.g. a challenging two-note measure on a single page of sheet music, the twisted arc within a complicated dive), slowed way down in practice, and then reassembled into an integrated whole. "Repeat it" touches on the research of 20th century Swede Anders Ericsson that found behind every so-called expert or super-talent, roughly ten years/ten thousand hours of committed practice - which Coyle believes foots perfectly with the intense and repetitive brain process of coiling myelin insulation layers around neuron circuits strengthening developing skills.

The third rule, "Feel it," is about learning in practice to sense the gap between what you are aiming for and a mistake. An awareness of a missed note, a feeling in the slightest off movement of a bad javelin toss, an ear for a mistake in grammar. Coyle describes this awareness in the words of Glenn Kurtz from Kurtz's book Practicing, "Each day, with every note, practicing is the same task, this essential human gesture - reaching out for an idea, for the grandeur of what you desire, and feeling it slip through your fingers." Now if that doesn't capture the struggle of learning, what does? Most important, it is the struggle that builds the skill.

These building blocks are simply not enough however without motivational fuel: the "rage to master," that ignition factor that leads us to want, to commit, to do. I'd welcome your thoughts on what made the difference for you between a routine practice and one that "clicked." What do you see in yourself, or in your children when they struggle to master something they passionately want to learn?

Let me close with an evocative poem by Billy Collins that speaks to me of the mystery and beauty of "deep practice."

PIANO LESSONS
by Billy Collins
1
My teacher lies on the floor with a bad back
off to the side of the piano.
I sit up straight on the stool.
He begins by telling me that every key
is like a different room
and I am a blind man who must learn
to walk through all twelve of them
without hitting the furniture.
I feel myself reach for the first doorknob.

2
He tells me that every scale has a shape
and I have to learn how to hold
each one in my hands.
At home I practice with my eyes closed.
C is an open book.
D is a vase with two handles.
G flat is a black boot.
E has the legs of a bird.

3
He says the scale is the mother of the chords.
I can see her pacing the bedroom floor
waiting for her children to come home.
They are out at nightclubs shading and lighting
all the songs while couples dance slowly
or stare at one another across tables.
This is the way it must be. After all,
just the right chord can bring you to tears
but no one listens to the scales,
no one listens to their mother.

4
I am doing my scales,
the familiar anthems of childhood.
My fingers climb the ladder of notes
and come back down without turning around.
Anyone walking under this open window
would picture a girl of about ten
sitting at the keyboard with perfect posture,
not me slumped over in my bathrobe, disheveled,
like a white Horace Silver.

5
I am learning to play
�It Might As Well Be Spring�
but my left hand would rather be jingling
the change in the darkness of my pocket
or taking a nap on an armrest.
I have to drag him in to the music
like a difficult and neglected child.
This is the revenge of the one who never gets
to hold the pen or wave good-bye,
and now, who never gets to play the melody.

6
Even when I am not playing, I think about the piano.
It is the largest, heaviest,
and most beautiful object in this house.
I pause in the doorway just to take it all in.
And late at night I picture it downstairs,
this hallucination standing on three legs,
this curious beast with its enormous moonlit smile.

Deep Practice

"We tend to think of our memory as a tape recorder, but that's wrong. It's a living structure, a scaffold of nearly infinite size. The more we generate impulses, encountering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build. The more scaffolding we build, the faster we learn." - Dr. Robert Bjork, as quoted in THE TALENT CODE by Daniel Coyle (Bantam Dell, 2009)

As part of my next few posts this month I'd like to present a very interesting book on the characteristics of talent and talent development by Daniel Coyle called, "The Talent Code: Greatness isn't born. It's Grown. Here's How." Of course the concept of talent has fascinated humans for as long as there have been contests of skill and intellect. History and science have long questioned the rise of particularly gifted individuals at crucial moments in human evolution. We are all aware of the prodigy, the late-bloomer, the ne'er do well... Is destiny an inherent measure of talent? Not necessarily. According to Coyle, prodigies have a fairly poor record of success over the long-haul, so he defines talent more narrowly as a set of repeatable skills that do not depend on physical size (with apologies to jockeys and linebackers. Yes, his book is funny as well as informative.) He then goes on to share what he learned traversing the globe researching "chicken-wire Harvards" - unlikely places of humble disposition with a track record of producing hugely talented folks. From ramshackle soccer fields to aging tennis courts, small vocal studios to jerry-rigged laboratories.

Coyle introduces a concept he labels "Deep Practice" - a form of focused, integrated thinking on a problem or goal frequently just beyond our present abilities that supersaturates the brain with deepening attention and analytical thinking. "It's all about finding the sweet spot," Bjork is quoted as saying. "There's an optimal gap between what you know and what you're trying to do. When you find the sweet spot, learning takes off." What makes this idea intriguing, and indeed recapitulates the subject of the book, talent, is the author's discovery that talent is a learned ability, not an innate given. Coyle says quite clearly at the beginning of his research, "Deep practice is a strange concept for two reasons. The first reason is that it cuts against our intuition about talent. Our intuition tells us that practice relates to talent in the same way that a whetstone relates to a knife: it's vital but useless without a solid blade of so-called natural ability. Deep practice raise an intriguing possibility: that practice might be the way to forge the blade itself." What follows is a book stuffed with science and studies that supports the idea that greatness is made, and anecdotal case stories from his research that prove talent can both be taught and fostered for almost any individual or pursuit. This is an idea well worth exploring in my opinion, as "Deep Practice" speaks to what the human brain is organically gifted at doing - learning.

A cross-sectional microscopic image in Coyle's book highlights two nerve fibers wrapping ever deeper in myelin - nerve insulation that increases neuron signal strength, speed, and accuracy. "Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals. The story of skill and talent is the story of myelin." Here is where science bites into the talent code, and where we begin to pay serious attention. The more we work at something, the more myelin we lay down, creating super-broadband connectivity within our brains associated with that task. With myelin we create a better brain for the job.

We focus our attention on those tasks we determine to master and then excel through better, more targeted practice learning. Looking inward I ask, What are the habits of practice I engage in as a writer that are pointless and unfocused, and those that are great plunges into the building blocks of performance? The writing tools on the table range from the well-read mind to coaching, personal daybooks and writing practice. Self-editing is a particularly important learned skill for the writer. Editing engages the writer in a deep critical analysis of one's own technique and writing style as well as "the voice" of the project. Working until the objective of a better sentence is achieved, is, as Hemingway remarked, working to a true sentence. When the thing is made, not described.

Deep practice into the art of language.

World Book Night, April 23, 2012

CROSSING THE ALASKA RANGE
Fractured rivers of time
Descend from the ice fields:
Lifeless black and white
Yield to color
And the hope of a second chance.
- Gregory Miller

Books are about chances. Circumstances, happenstance, accident, and serendipity all cross paths in literature. When you open a book, you open yourself to the possibility of surprise. Somehow our imaginations yield from black and white to color.

World Book Night was a terrific adventure in meeting people who love books, those with a passing familiarity, and those whose last book might have been part of a school homework assignment. As I was traveling from Spokane to Maui over this period, I had the opportunity to place the book of my choice, Junot Diaz' Pulitzer Prize winner, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," in the hands of an optician, a beautician, a hydrologist from Elko, a Hawaiian hotel maid, a tourist on an airplane, an Army soldier on leave from Iraq, a med student in the airport, a busy concierge at an Asian Travel Services desk, several harried physicians at a regional hospital, and an engineering student from MIT. Not your usual readers, all surprised and curious. We talked about World Book Night in America, and I suggested they continue the gift of a free book by passing it on to someone they knew when finished.

I was struck by several things in this process: the degree to which people love books and are delighted to hold one in their hands; the reality of how our increasingly busy lives have cut us off from the pleasure of reading; and the way that everyone I stopped to talk with appreciated not just the gift of a good book, but the encouragement to drop out of the work world of email and into the pages of a story.

I'm on travel until the end of the week, but when I return, I will post pictures from my adventures with World Book Night, USA. Stay tuned.

Azure World

THE EAGLE

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
- fragment, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I'm about to embark on a holiday to my favorite place in the world, the Island of Maui, Hawaii. This island is both beautiful and sacred to me, a temple of nature rising green and blue from the sheen of the Pacific. Ringed by white beaches, steep volcanic mountains and emerald valleys, Maui is a place unlike any other. On Maui I find myself thinking more spaciously, abundantly, leaning into to a farther horizon. I usually find both restoration, peace and vision on the island. I have actually made most of my life's major goals standing on Maui's western shore by this one gray wind-twisted tree, a survivor bent and smoothed by the trade winds, an ancient of nature rooted into the cool surf that invites me to lean on its sturdy trunk as I sort out my life and reset my inner compass. O, I am looking forward to touching its smooth branches! To my toes talking with the sand and the sea life. To see if I can't become bigger than what life usually makes of me, or I of life. Bigger dreams, more courage, the thunderbolt that falls.

It is important we have our own sacred place in life; an earthly cathedral, a physical touchstone of the deeper self we can carry in our hearts as we go about our daily compressed lives. A personal square of this wondrous planet that speaks to the hugeness of what life is and who we are in our own much more humble existence. A place of wonder. Of memory. A sounding board that helps us navigate forward into the next journey. Return, regroup, refresh, renew.

I promise to drop in with a note this week in the Pacific. In the meantime, Aloha from Maui.