Beginning Anew

Remember all your firsts? Your first love, your first time traveling abroad, your first month or so of a new job? There is no guarantee, but chances are good that you felt the freshness, excitement and promise of starting out. The delight of not knowing anything wholly, just the delicious sense of living on the edge of discovery, each moment new and filled with the pleasure of novelty. The axons and dendrites in the brain who are meeting each other for the first time are feeling, “It’s party time! Let the new connections spark!”

 

Alfred North Whitehead talked about this long ago as the cycle of all learning. He named the first stage “Romance” and aptly so, as it has that floating feeling of being swept off your feet. You are thrown off balance from the usual knowable feelings and thoughts and routines and predictable actions and reactions and you don’t care. In fact, you love it. Like the images in the old jazz love songs, there is the euphoria of being released from the gravity of the workaday world:

 

“ All at once am I, several stories high, knowing I’m on the street where you live.”

 

 “Lately I seem to walk as though I had wings…”

 

“Darn your lips and darn your eyes, they lift me high above the moonlit skies…”

 

“Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I…”

 

Sometimes we get angry that the initial promise of romantic love dulls down to the precision (Whitehead’s term) of the long haul. We feel the shine and luster fade and instead of pledging undying love, we’re arguing about the kitchen paint colors. But whether it be a romantic relationship or digging into the details of playing Balinese gamelan after the initial enchantment when we heard it for the first time, or getting serious about curriculum after the magic of just jamming with the kids in the Orff class, there is also a great pleasure in the control and understanding that Precision offers. The delight of floating in the air transforms to the gratification of coming back to earth, feeling back in control, able to steer your own car and drive to the destination you choose. Until that moment when everything feels just a bit too habitual, a trifle too familiar. When it all becomes just routine, entirely predictable, it's time to get out of town.

 

And so the conversation between novelty and familiarity goes on. If we’re lucky, they move to the third stage of Synthesis, where we return to the playful explorations and welcome unknowns but armed with precise techniques and understandings. The surprises are smaller, but still can uplift us. Instead of moving to a whole new city, we discover a new neighborhood in ours or a new details around the block that we never noticed. Here’s the moment when that oft-practiced passage in the technically-demanding Bach fugue reveals a new facet of its beauty to you. Or the oft-traveled routes our fingers take in our jazz solo suddenly moves off the trail into exciting new territory. 

 

All this prelude to my first day of teaching in Toronto. Far from unfamiliar territory, as I’ve come here most every summer since 2001 to teach. But now I’m teaching for three weeks at a school I only taught at once for two days, staying alone in a house all to myself in a new section of town that I don't know well. I set out last night to explore and there it was—that tingling of romance getting to know a new place, noting the bakery and Thai restaurant and Natural Foods store where I shopped for the meals to come, cooked on a new-fangled induction stove. A house with an electric piano that has a vibraphone setting (love these!) and the amazing possibility of playing whenever I want without worrying about the neighbors. A two-subway ride and 20-minute walk in cold, grey weather past uninviting brick houses to get to the school, but still, it’s an adventure! It’s fun! That sensation of beginning my life anew as I get familiar with these novel surroundings, of starting out yet again to taste this marvelous life, as if I’m 18 or 28 or even 52. How I love it.

 

I had the same sensation a few months back in Taipei as I got to know the ice-cream vendor, this restaurant, that walk along the canal. The same feeling I had some years back figuring out the subway system in Tokyo and wandering through parks and temples. And most powerfully of all, that first time in Salzburg when I was 52 and living a six-week life that fed every fiber of my being. Here I was in a beautiful place filled with interesting people (the students I taught) at a place that was the Mecca of my profession (the Orff Institut) doing the work I was born for. I went back every two years for the next 16 or so, but nothing quite equaled the power of that first time.

 

And then the actual work I did today with the kids. In the midst of teaching the 3^rd graders, 2^nd graders, kindergarteners, I felt myself smiling from head to foot and feeling what I always feel when I’m in a room with kids making music—“I am just so damn happy!” The kids are at once new and wholly familiar. My material is almost routine, but there are always little openings that appear that keep it fresh. 

 

In short, I could do this forever. And yet I know that I can’t. So nothing to do but savor every precious moment of it while it lasts. And hope the invites keep coming!