Learning to Stay: A Meditation on Piano Practice

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Musical interlude: McCoy Tyner, Wave (Supertrios, 1977). This is the tune and the recording of it that made me want to be a jazz pianist. With Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. A Supertrio.

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I’m one of those people who has dabbled in yoga and meditation and mindfulness over the years (more so during the pandemic lockdown), but I’ve never been very good at sitting still, let alone stilling my mind. 

Piano practice, now that I understand it better, has given me what I was missing. The thing about piano practice is that when I’m in the right mindset, it completely consumes me. I don’t – can’t – think about anything else.

Like mindfulness practice, piano practice requires

• intention (to focus),

• attention (to what I am doing in the moment and how I feel about it), and

• attitude (to be kind to myself, curious about what is and isn’t working, and utterly nonjudgmental), the hardest part for me.

I studied classical piano seriously through college and was good enough in high school to consider applying to music school. I didn’t in the end for a variety of reasons. I didn’t think I was good enough. I couldn’t envision what life as a professional classical pianist would look like. I was entirely consumed with getting out of the suburban hell I was in and too busy getting high and having inept teenage sex to put in the time practicing. Or so I’ve told myself for nearly fifty years.

After reading Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within by Kenny Werner, I realized the real reason I hadn’t pursued a career in music. I didn’t understand what practice was or how to do it. I was focused on the end game, not on the activity of well-designed practice. I was all about what I was trying to accomplish, which, in my case, meant being the best (overachiever that I was). And if I couldn't achieve that, I was a failure. 

I stopped playing for over 40 years.

And took it up again just over a year ago — before I stopped working. It was a sign of things to come.

Jazz piano. Not classical.

My teacher had me read Effortless Mastery when I started studying with him. I’d have subtitled it A Buddhist Approach to Practice. It’s a strategy for achieving unconscious competence (the fourth stage of competence after unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, and conscious competence), otherwise known as effortless mastery. It’s how you get from being pretty bad at something to being pretty good at it.

(This is not an easy read, but it’s well worth the effort for serious musicians.)

Practice Makes Perfect. Not.

Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Rule (Outliers, 2008) asserts that “10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness.” Gladwell is often misunderstood – he was talking about greatness, not above-averageness (he cites Bill Gates and the Beatles as examples). One can debate whether it actually takes 10,000 hours and what role natural ability and pedagogy and a whole host of other variables play. Gladwell acknowledged this didn’t apply to athletes, likely because physical attributes – think Olympian Michael Phelps’s 84” wingspan – play a decisive role in sports. 

Regardless of the distinction, this whole conversation about achieving greatness – or even middle-of-the-road-ness – distracts from the value of practice in its own right: it’s not the outcome that matters. 

Why Practice?

So why practice something if perfection (or even adequacy) isn’t your goal? 

Practice gives you permission to make mistakes and let them go. For the overachievers among us, this is a gift. It’s much more comfortable to try things you already know how to do or which you know you’ll succeed at. Who wants to set themself up for failure? This is a way to get outside your comfort zone.

Practice teaches discipline and perseverance. I’ve learned to practice what I need to practice, not what I’ve already mastered. I am improving as a result.

Practice is not the same as performance. If I’m not setting myself up for perfection or worried about how I will sound to others, I am much less hard on myself when something doesn’t go well. My cats think I'm awesome even when I'm not.

Practice keeps you in the moment. It works far better for me than imagining I’m sitting on the ocean floor with a bubble over me watching my thoughts bounce off – I can’t remember who suggested this approach to meditation to me, but it did not work. 

I came to appreciate what practice offered by way of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun who took her vows only after several children and two failed marriages. I’d read quite a bit about Buddhism and mindfulness over the years but was never entirely persuaded. 

Maybe because I was so miserable (it was early in the pandemic) or because Taking the Leap is only 60 pages long (my attention span was dwindling), or because she came from the real world, it took. 

Chodron's concept of pausing – “learning to stay” instead of running away from challenging situations – felt right to me, but it was very hard for me to do it … until I began practicing the piano. 

What I’ve gained from piano practice (aside from a huge improvement in my playing) is the ability to sit still, doing nothing except perhaps stroking one of my rescue cats. My brain no longer overloads with guilt or anxiety when I’m not doing something “productive.” It is productive, just not in the way that I’d previously thought about productivity. It’s remarkably calming and energizing at the same time.

And I know practice is what got me here.

What’s Your Practice?

I realize it’s easier to return to something you’ve once been pretty good at than start from scratch. That said, you really can take up something new if your goal isn’t perfection. 

You can pick something small and of seemingly little import to anyone other than you; no one cares. I took up pottery at one point and have a rag-tag collection of lopsided bowls to show for it. I love them.

You can spend two minutes, not two hours, a day; no one keeps track. Maybe someday I will be able to speak Spanish.

You can walk away and come back. Or not. Or try something else. 

It’s only a recalibration.