Constant Learning et al.

I firmly believe in the paradigm of constant learning and am very happy to have started with the piano lessons I mentioned in the blog entry from two weeks ago. After only two lessons and practicing a bit at home, I can firmly say that this will be great learning. It’s so tough to let your ten fingers do different things! It’s easy if the two hands work in parallel but most of piano playing means that the left hand does something different from the right hand and I can virtually feel the synapses firing in my brain when I am brooding over the exercises. It was similar with drums but piano is much handier to practice considering noise level and the amount of space that the instrument requires.

Such kind of exercise gives also instant satisfaction if you practice and practice and finally manage that particular rhythm or melody.

Also writing should be a constant learning process and one of constant improvement. I am confident that I know much more about writing now than I did a year ago and loads more than I did two years ago and so forth. So, hopefully, my writing will be better next year and the year after? We’ll see

I’m trying to do the constant learning also in my travels with the self-made promise to visit if ever possible a country I haven’t been to before every year. If that doesn’t work out due to financial or time reasons then at least a place I have never been to before once per year, even if it is in a country I’ve visited already. For example, last year I was in the Czech Republic for the first time, this year I’ve booked a trip to Taiwan over our Golden Week holidays here in Japan end of April, etc. Taiwan will be the 25th country that I visit, I know there are people with much more countries under their belt, but I’m working on it

I’ve hit a personal ceiling/challenge with the re-learning of driving a car and am still struggling with that task. A scene from the movie “Rush” around the 1970ties F1 racers James Hunt and Niki Lauda, which I watched recently, stands out like a big fat monument in my mind. I don’t know about reality, but in the movie James Hunt regularly throws up before getting into his car for a race. This little detail appeals so much to me! Yes! It’s like that still before I am getting into my car now. I’m scared! Laugh. And now I must work on doing what Hunt has done, jump into that car and go despite the fear and find the joy in doing so. My driving is of course far less dangerous than racing, but the principle of fear is the same

Another scene from that movie left me impressed – again, historical accuracy does not matter – it’s the scene when Niki Lauda tries to put his helmet back on after that horrific accident at the Nuernburg Ring that forever disfigured him and burnt half his face and head away. It’s incredibly painful to put on the helmet and his wife catches him trying and he says to her something in the lines of “if you love me, don’t say anything now”. This is the fight of will against external circumstances. In the movie the motivation to do this painful thing is that he does not want Hunt to win the championship. I’m not sure what the real Lauda’s motivation was for getting back behind the wheel of an F1 car only a few weeks after his accident. Whatever it was that drove him, something drove him. Without that internal motivator nothing happens.

So, learning the piano is clearly motivated by the wish for constant learning, but the wish to write comes from somewhere else and that’s simply that it’s the one thing I like doing most of all in the whole world

Now this has become one weird blog entry about learning, piano, travel, writing and a movie and I’ll leave it at that