One thing that I am currently re-discovering is still confusing me.
I am in a second period of low yoga activity; I'm not doing a whole lot of it. I found that there are a couple of postures that I'm able to engage more deeply that I had been when I was doing yoga three-to-five times a week. This confuses me. This runs completely counter to my work ethic and the idea that progress is the payoff for work. Instead, I find occasionally that not-working has delivered progress that I have sought.
I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea that not-working on something yields progress where working on something did not. I'm not entirely comfortable with this. My immediate, deeply ingrained response is that by being lazy, something can be accomplished? That hardly seems logical or fair.
Of course I should look at the discovery, accept it, and move onward, but I do not like to accept something without a satisfactory understanding of it. I don't like not-understanding.
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I have been thinking quite a lot about this since I first read it. And here's what I now have to say:
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a child in dance classes, I'd struggle and struggle with a step, get frustrated and leave it for a few days and then discover that I knew it fine when I finally came back to it. Of course, running counter to that would be the times I got a step instantly in class so never bothered to practice it and then couldn't do it by the next class.
While in college I'd struggle with a homework assignment (usually math or physics), leave it, then come back and suddenly have a much better understanding of the mechanism. Again, the counter is that I would occasionally understand a concept from the get-go, not bother to study it for the exam and shoot myself in the foot on those problems, metaphorically speaking, of course.
Most recently, I find this is still working out with the bariuke. I can have a day of complete and utter shite practice - nothing goes right, nothing sounds good and certain songs make me want to use my head to smash the instrument into toothpicks. So I stop. I set it down before I do it or myself damage and I walk away. When I come back to it, I find those frustrations fading and the songs are working the way they should and usually better than before. I don't have the counterexample for this one, because now I've learned (or at least I like to think I've learned) not to not practice even the easy stuff. It's still necessary as well.
As to why things work this way... I'm not entirely sure. But my best guess is that when we keep working and working and working at something we keep it very intellectual and it's easier to f*ck it up that way. But when we walk away from it for awhile, we give our minds and bodies a chance to process it and internalize it so that when we come back to it, we automatically know what to do. Not because we were lazy and complacent, but precisely because we had worked so hard at it first and then had the sense to leave it alone to process. I think it's similar to the sensation I'd have shortly before recitals too: waiting in the wings, I'd try to run through the steps in head only to come up completely blank. Terrified. But once the music started I knew exactly what to do. "Let your mind go and your body will follow" as Steve Martin says in _L.A._Story_.