9/27/25: Playing The Long Game: Going Slow and the Issue of "Easy"

Staring at me on my desk is a short poem by my favorite poet Mary Oliver (get ready to hear a lot from Mary if you become a regular here…). The poem is called “Don’t Worry” from her collection Felicity and reads:

Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.

How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?

            And scene. That’s it. I love that poem, and there’s a reason I require it to stare me down while I work in my home office. It echoes one of the most oft forgotten lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic: slow down. For all human history, the pressure to achieve quickly led to numerous innovations (see “the wheel” and “fire”). But as I reflect on my own education, my students’ education, and my colleagues’ behaviors as a result of their education, I ask myself, ‘Speed, but at what cost?’ What is the point of pushing a student to achieve an incredible musical performance if they quit playing music before their prefrontal cortex fully develops. Who can understand Chopin’s melodies or Neil Peart’s rhythms before their prefrontal cortex develops?!

            And yet, numerous students have been and continue to be told that they cannot be musicians because they don’t achieve fast enough. Some people are going be triggered by that. “My students didn’t quit because they didn’t achieve fast enough! They quit because they didn’t practice.” Yea, well, what was the goal of the things you were asking them to practice? To get them to experience music. Sure. But it’s really to get them to (perform) music (that often you care about and they don’t, quickly). And these students grow up to be adults who don’t support music not because they don’t like it but because they were told at some point, implicitly or otherwise, that they didn’t work hard enough to achieve quick enough to belong in music. Careful the things you say, children will listen.

            The issue of speed in music education is closely aligned with the issue of “easy.” Teachers often say “I don’t understand why this is taking so long. It’s not that hard.” Yes, not hard for you, maybe, but have you ever considered the fact that you became the teacher because certain things were easier for you than others? To be sure, you worked hard to refine and develop those skills. I do not want to be disrespectful or dismissive of the hard work that is still required by those to whom musical concepts come easier than others. Aptitude only gets us so far. But nothing is easy. Just because it was easy for one, does not mean it will be easy for everyone. And as all working musicians know (at least the honest ones...), nothing ever gets easier. The music stays hard, the hours we work stay hard, the pay stays low. It never gets easy, and to chase a point in time where things “become easy” is folly.

            I’ll illustrate this idea using a common musical concept that is “easy”: the musical alphabet. We are often told that the musical alphabet is easy! There are only 7 letters (as opposed to the English alphabet which has 26). The letters go from A to G, and then they just repeat! Easy!

            Unless you grew up in Germany where (because of a HIGHLY interesting reason dealing with medieval music notation and hard and soft Bs…another blog…) they use the letter H for the note we call B. Then things aren’t so easy. Also, the musical alphabet can go forwards and backwards. That’s hard! I have no idea why people are asked to say the alphabet backwards as a sobriety test. I can’t even do it before I’ve have my espresso martini! And those are just two ways that this "easy" concept can easily become confusing.

            So, what are we do to? Easy. Go slow and get comfortable with things being hard. As teachers (which we all are, at some point), we can use the recognition that things are more nuanced than we think to go slower and attempt to be a little more understanding and empathetic of others’ perspectives. Easy.

When someone gives a “wrong answer” in life, I often ask myself “why did they think that was a smart and correct answer.” The answer to THAT question often makes me slow down and realize things are not as easy as they seem.