When I was coming up through public schools, one thing I learned quickly and took to heart was you were supposed to succeed. So, in many ways I learned how not to learn.
One of my sons, who has an enviable memory, did not learn to read in first grade until his teacher realized he had learned the books in the reading group by heart and was simply repeating the lines as he had memorized them. He did the same thing, at first, with algebra: rather than abstracting he memorized the problems and their answers. He got by all that once he was found out. Then he had to struggle with learning the sounds the letters made, and he had to learn the abstract part of algebra which could be applied to word problems with different words but the same algebraic problem.
Now, at a ripe age, I am trying to learn to play the piano.
This requires memory, rhythm, pitch and a lot of things I know I am lacking. But mostly, it requires memory and practice and persistence.
I have reason to believe I will never be much of a piano player. It is something you learn in pieces and add one piece on top of another, until you have enough of a package to use it. It is frustrating, and I fail a lot.
My teacher is demanding, but patient.
He makes a living teaching piano, an occupation for which I have developed immense respect. He is pressing me to use parts of my brain which are not simply long dormant, but probably congenitally absent. So, I fail a lot.
But the failure is okay. Even though I cannot do the things which require beat, rhythm and memory and all the things you need to play the piano, I now listen to someone playing the piano and I hear things I never could hear before. I've always been transported by music; it's been like heroin. But now, I can hear things I never could hear before. So my world has been enlarged.
I had a friend who, at age 70 something decided he ought to learn Swedish. Why Swedish I never found out. But he worked at it steadily. We moved too far apart for me to learn how far he got. He may never had learned much Swedish. But he was trying.
Somehow, all the frustration which is involved in learning is part of the package.
There are some people who seem to learn music and languages with little frustration. They go from success to success. I'm not sure what to make of them. I cannot recall ever learning anything without trying hard, except maybe swimming, which just seemed to happen. I watched other kids swim, got the group lessons at camp and then jumped in and swam, as far as I can recall. When they coached us on the swimming team, I did what they told us to do, and it worked. Nothing frustrating there. Teaching people how to swim, I realized it's not that easy for everyone.
Maybe it's like that for some people with languages and piano.
But somehow, for reasons I cannot fully comprehend, I think it's important, at least later in life, to keep trying to learn things which frustrate you.
It keeps the world new and fresh. You remember what it was like trying to learn stuff, how it felt to be a kid before everything gets transferred from the conscious part of your brain to the unconscious part, further down toward the brainstem.
When you first learn to type, it's all frustration and drudgery, but then, once you've been doing it for years, it's just in there. No thought involved. In fact, if you try to write down a picture of the keyboard, forget it. You can't. You can use the keyboard, but it's not on the conscious level of knowledge.
As you get older, there are a lot of things just in there, and there's less daily frustration.
That's why you should try the piano, or the violin or something you find frustrating.
It'll make you feel young again.
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