The Pencil

I was getting ready for a day of practice. I remembered that, the day before, I had found a pencil in my piccolo case - but the lead was broken. I searched my apartment for my pencil sharpener, knowing it was likely I would need the pencil to mark my music. After browsing through a tub of office supplies in my closet and looking through the general area of my printer, the sharpener was nowhere to be found.

I began to get stressed out. "Now I have to waste time going to the store to buy a pencil sharpener...why can't I be more organized - I would save so much more time...Look at this mess of books in my closet! Why can't I keep them organized..."

[For those of you who know me well, you know that staying organized is one of the most stressful and difficult tasks for me. I'm terrible at it. I don't know how I've managed to get this far in life with such poor organizational skills, but hey, I'm here.]

I walked out to my car, now angry about both the lost pencil sharpener AND my lack of organizational skills. I looked over to the floor by the passenger seat of my car and saw some papers stacked there, mostly old mail from my mailbox a block from my apartment. "I can't even keep my car clean!"

I arrived at the store, now upset about the pencil sharpener, my unclean closet at home, AND the papers on the floor of my car. I walked into the store, found a five pack of mechanical pencils (no sharpener needed!), paid $1.50 for them, and left.

I got back in my car and caught myself. Buying the pencils took 3 minutes of my time. The store was on the way to campus, where I was heading to practice. I had just allowed a stress bomb to go off, all over what ended up being a 3 minute process. WHY???

I would say about 75% of my stress comes from situations such as this. I have to do one thing, such as respond to an email, do an assignment, or play flute warm-up exercises. However, my mind ends up thinking about five other things and allowing the stress to accumulate unnecessarily.  Before I know it, I'm a ticking time bomb of stress waiting to explode. A lot of the time, this stress spills over into whatever activity I'm actually trying to do and makes things go downhill.

I notice this a lot while playing. I play some nice long tones, then I get a little tense for articulation exercises, and by the time I get to scales, in which I need to be quite relaxed, I'm sometimes already all tensed up, leading to errors in the exercises and causing more tension to pile up. I caught this happening to me today, and I did something good.

I stepped away for a break.

I live 3.5 miles from campus, so practice breaks are often quite inconvenient. If I have a 2-3 hr block of time, it's tempting to spend the entire time practicing. However, I have noticed that the stress response that builds up is largely my brain saying, "Hey! The human mind can only focus for like...20 minutes. Can we take a break now?"

As the spring semester begins next week, I'm going to experiment with shorter blocks of practice time. I should be able to get more done in these smaller chunks, because my brain won't be fighting its "ooo, shiny" distraction sense quite so much. Practicing in smaller chunks should keep my body more relaxed, which in turn, should lead to more accurate playing.

Mechanical pencils. Those will help, too.