I decided that when I turned 50, I would learn to read sheet music and play the piano. I didn’t even know where middle C was to start with, and set the goal to learn to play the Moonlight Sonata by sight reading the notes before I stopped lessons. The cute sheet music with the letters inside the notes is like Kindergarten. We can play a little and feel good about it, but we won’t be booking gigs with that level of skill. We move on to easy songs or versions of music that are not the “real thing”, like high school. We think we are pretty cool in our own little circle until we hear someone who knows what they are doing and feel like the little fish in the big pond again. Not until we have lots of skill and have spent many hours learning to read the notes fluently do we really feel successful. (Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day). Interestingly, in real life, learning to be fluent in how to be our best selves can take us until the very end, and we may never feel fluent in navigating life.
With the piano, I had to work through different sheet music. I started with the first line of the music using only the right hand to get the location of the notes figured out. Then I have to understand the rhythm of how my fingers need to go over those notes in the correct cadence. Then I have to add the left hand, those notes, and that cadence in concert with the right hand to make it recognizable. It takes a long time to just get the first line of the music down, and by the time you figure out the 2nd line, the first is a little foggy. It takes many, many hours to work through an entire song to get so good at playing in a way people can actual enjoy it.
Life is like that, too. We feel really awkward and work slowly to learn new things. It is easy to lose sight of why we are doing it. With something like learning a new language, we may have an ultimate goal to spur us on, but what about learning emotional intelligence? What about learning to control our temper? It is hard, and awkward, and we try and fail, try and fail. We may try, and it sounds off-key. We try and try and try, and it just doesn’t feel like we’ve made it that far. We are still not good at it, and know we have a long way to go to get proficient at it.
When my kids were young, I found myself losing my temper with them over little things. I would raise my voice and get really upset over seemingly small things. Not only did I not like it, but it was not healthy for my kids to feel my anger when it wasn’t warranted. That was how my parents modeled parenting to me, but I was determined to be better than that. I had read about using a dollar jar to break my habit, so I got a bunch of one-dollar bills from the bank and told my kids that if I raised my voice they could point it out without retribution from me. I HAD to put a dollar in the jar if I lost my temper for any reason, not just small ones. They could then use that money to go to Dairy Queen when we got enough money.
Over that year, my kids ate a lot of ice cream. It was a long, hard, painful process for me to even realize when I was raising my voice. However, the pain of having to put another dollar in the jar helped me recognize when I was yelling. Over time, I would hear myself raise my voice and in the middle of a sentence say, “Dang it, I did it again!” and start laughing. It really did take about a year for me to find a way to express myself in a way that was constructive and healthy with my kids. A whole year to curb my anger? After that, it wasn’t that I never raised my voice anymore, but I did so consciously and with awareness of what caused it (and if it was necessary, like to warn of danger, or make an important point).
Change is hard. Learning is not easy. Learning, forgetting, starting again, getting better – it is all part of life. If we choose it. We have to see the benefit, and we have to have resilience. I am a better mother for choosing to curb my anger. What can you choose to work on that you know you won’t regret and are willing to put the time in and not give up until it becomes easy to you?
Wendy J. Quinn 