Mid-winter blog topics

Catching up on a few "to blog" ideas I've jotted down recently.

Feeling with your fingers

At guitar lessons I'm learning some more difficult things, which require changing chord shapes with your left hand and travelling further up and down the neck, and require more complex picking patterns with the right hand on non-adjacent strings. And my teacher was telling me how you keep track without looking - for example if you are standing to play, with the guitar on a strap rather than resting in your lap in the easy chair where you watch TV, and looking out making eye contract with the crowd. You know, because I'll be doing this so soon, that I need to know the right technique.

And he was saying that when he plays, he pays attention to how it feels, attends to his fingers making contact with strings that he's not playing, staying aware of the parts of guitar that he's touching. And I said, "Yes, I think I've been playing with my brain, but I need to start doing it with my body."

I was trying to apply this mindset for the next week, while practicing and while going around in the world, but found it a little scary. I think sometimes it's easier to live in your mind, detached from the physical world that's right there touching you. But it sounds like a good idea to try to be more aware of it, and if it makes me a better guitar player, then it's the right way to go.

Double Vision

I have been going to a poetry group in town, not reading poems because I don't really write them, but reading blog entries, mostly, the ones that are the most poem-like, which usually turn out to be the ones about Wisconsin weather. Also, I recently had to buy my first pair of reading glasses, which happens to everyone eventually, but it's still new to me. So a few weeks ago I was there, reading some blog entries about the weather, standing at a podium, and had for the first time the experience of looking down through the glasses at the printed sheet, and then over top of the glasses out at the audience to connect with them. It was hard. When you speak you need to look up at folks (at the end of every sentence, is what I heard - if you do that smoothly enough they don't even know you're reading), and these glasses were a barrier. If I accidentally looked through them instead of over them the people were just an indistinct blur. I even wondered about keeping my hand on the glasses and then removing them when looking out at the crowd. I will have to experiment with this more.

Distracted

Also from going to the poetry group, I've been having again in my life the experience of not at all listening to the person who's speaking, because you are in your mind rehearsing the thing that you are about to say when it's your turn next.

Other times when one has this:

• Speech meets in High School. Going second was the best, you'd just miss the first speaker, didn't have to dive right in before the room was warmed up, but it was close enough to the front of the line-up that the nerves wouldn't accumulate and go over the top.
• Meetings at work. Especially when a boss is going around the table and asking for updates from each person in turn. You spend your time going over and over the phrasing to make sure it's got just the right businessy words, the lead message right up front, a confident tone, not too rambly.
• In a fight, or when mad at somebody. When actually fighting, you are constructing your next move in the argument all the while the mad-ee is saying their angry part. Dangerous, because this is just when you should be listening the most. And when mad but not in the presence of the mad-ee, even in an unrelated conversation, your brain is writing arguments and rejoinders to the absent person, and you don't pay attention to the one right in front of you talking about something else.

I've had many occasions, many hobbies and pursuits, that were dominated by this kind of state. But not so strongly lately as in that poetry group. I must try to listen more. With practice I'll be I can get it.