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Forced mindfulness

I am starting the New Year by teaching a thermodynamics course that is new for me. There are so many details to attend to and to learn, that it feels like I don’t have a minute to stop and think about what is it that I am actually doing. Surprisingly, it is a liberating feeling to not have a choice of what to do in the next hour, but instead to have an obvious high-priority task in front of me at all times and to know that as soon as it is completed, another one would waiting in line right behind it.

This externally imposed state of focus is strikingly similar to skiing, or any gravity-assisted sport for that matter, where external conditions continuously and rapidly change and force you to adapt to them. When you are going down a mountain slope at high speed, turns, bumps on the ground and other people come your way all the time, and you must deal with each challenge, focussing only what is right in front of you at each moment . The same thing happens when you are skateboarding or surfing: you need to continuously adjust your balance, adapt to conditions of the road and avoid obstacles. When my daughter was taking skateboarding lessons last summer, her teacher, Carla, called this concentrated attention forced mindfulness.

For me, the takeaway from this observation is that doing demanding work, like teaching a new course, doesn’t have to be stressful. It is all a matter perspective. After all, when I ski down a mountain and have to deal with whatever is coming my way, I don’t consider it a stress. In fact, I enjoy the flow. It may be forced, but it is flow nonetheless.

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Reason for practicing

When I come back from a skiing trip, I typically have mixed feelings. On the one hand, skiing is fun, but on the other hand, I know that I cannot do it often enough to improve my technique substantially. And for me, part of the joy of doing something is learning to do it better. So if I know that progress is not possible, I wonder wha’s the point of doing the thing at all.

After our recent trip to Whistler I feel differently. I am fired up to get on the slope again as soon as possible. I believe that this is entirely thanks to my daughter (well, maybe also partially because I bought new skis, which are great fun). She is seven years old, and it was the first time that we were actually able to ski together. Her progress was so sudden: last time she attempted skiing, she was barely able to keep balance on the flattest surface we could find, but this year, she took two days of instruction at the kids’ skiing school and after that could confidently stop and turn on a legitimate green-level run.

My wife and I also took a lesson, to re-calibrate ourselves after the long break in skiing. The advice our instructors gave me, as we were chatting over hot chocolate during the lunch break, was that the focus of practicing for me should be improving efficiency of my skiing. The reason is that pretty soon our daughter would want to ski more and more, so to keep up with her (and to enjoy it), I need to get better too. I like the idea. It resonates with what Anders Ericsson said in “Peak”: the reason to keep practicing a skill, even knowing that we won’t be able to reach the absolute peak performance (there are so many people better than us ataxy given activity), is to be able to enjoy it alongside our children.

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Collective experience

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow” is possibly the most enjoyable non-fiction book I’ve read. It makes perfect sense, of course, because the book is about optimal experiences. As I’ve been reading it, I notice the concepts described there everywhere around me. For example, one of the theses is that for an activity to be enjoyable it needs to be autotelic, i.e. deriving the meaning from itself. Ultimately, it all comes down to being present, which means paying close attention to whatever one is doing at the moment. Apparently, it helps if we have heightened expectations of the experience and also if large groups of people participate in the same activity. Csikszentmihalyi gives an example of live music performances, and I think that any kind of group activity or event works in a similar way to focus our attention. I see it regularly at my own kendo practices, tournaments and gradings. It is often difficult for me to convince myself to go, but it is seldom a question whether it was worth it once I am there.

Most recently, I saw an example of this effect last Saturday. I was taking photos of a rehearsal of the Christmas parade routine that will be performed by my daughter’s dance school next weekend. From an objective point of view, taking part in the parade should be a miserable experience. Last year, for example, it was pouring cold rain all through the event, and there is every indication that the weather could be the same this year. The rehearsal itself is also tough – more than 150 people cramped together in a dance studio for more than an hour. Yet, the dancers evidently have been having tremendous fun. My photo gallery of the last year’s parade is the most visited of the entire school year coverage. The camaraderie between the different age groups is amazing to witness. My daughter was eager to be part of the parade crew just for the experience of spending time next to the older dancers, whom she admires, and doing something together. I also cannot help but feel lucky that I have an opportunity to have an insider’s look at this collective experience and also to contribute to it by attempting to capture the elusive atmosphere of “flow”. An important part of any experience is our recollection of it, and photos not only capture memories, but actually shape them.

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Prepared piano

I have never heard of a prepared piano until a couple of months ago. It’s one of the many music-related things I have not heard about until I started learning violin and piano alongside my seven year old daughter. It’s ironic, because my main work area is related to acoustics, and some of the most fundamental works in the field deal with theory of musical instruments. So it is quite exciting to come face-to-face with some of the physics that I have only known in theoretical or applied engineering contexts.

Last Saturday, my daughter tried playing a prepared piano for the first time. She has been looking forward to it ever since she heard about wedging coins and pieces of rubber between piano strings from our teacher, who studied it systematically and actually wrote a book about John Cage’s techniques. As you can see in the video, she was delighted at the transformation of the piano into a percussion instrument. “I don’t recognize the sounds!” she cried.

What I personally learn from this is that music in general, and musical education in particular, is more about excitement of discovery and joy of “flow” than it is about training for performance. My daughter and I have been incredibly lucky to have teachers, who give us these glimpses of optimal experiences, to borrow a term from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, so early in our studies. “Don’t forget to smile!” Is my daughter’s favourite reminder to me during our practice sessions.

Another thing I learned is to remember to switch my camera to manual focus when filming in a dimply-lit room. To my excuse, though, the whole prepared piano demonstration was very spontaneous, so I was shooting from the hip, both literally and figuratively speaking.

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Risk-taking and fun

Rock climbing is a lot of fun. After our daughter tried it at our university’s climbing gym, my wife and I were compelled to take a belaying course the very next weekend, so that we would be able to assist her. As a lunch-hour workout though, it’s pretty inefficient compared to a run or a weightlifting session. Still, I concede that the fun factor is more important for sustaining a long-term interest in the activity.

On the other hand, there is the risk factor. How does one handle the choice between doing something inherently risky (but fun) and something much less risky (but possibly better for your health)? I think that if one takes the path of avoiding all risks, not only the life would be incredibly dull, but one would end up unprepared for the eventual situation when the risk simply cannot be avoided. So we need to practice taking risks, but do so safely enough to avoid injuring ourselves all the time.

I am very new to climbing, so cannot say anything about it with authority, but take kendo as an example. It is a fairly low-risk activity, as far as martial arts go, but injuries still occur (I am recovering from one right now). Kendo is also a very high-impact activity. I don’t think it is good for one’s health from a cardio perspective either. The exertion level is too uneven to be beneficial. You both overload the cardiovascular system too much (at times), and do not sustain the useful load level long enough. So would one be better off going for an easy run or lifting some weights instead?

“But kendo is more about building character, rather than muscles or stamina!” some say. I agree. There is no argument against this. For this reason alone, it is worth taking risks in general and practicing kendo in particular.

…as long as we can avoid replacing “character” with “ego” somewhere in the process.

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Resistance

This drawing had been “in progress” for months. It had been sitting on top of the table, with pencils and markers all ready to go. It was a textbook case of resistance, as it is described in “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield. I always managed to find an excuse not to come back to the drawing. Clearly, it was easier to continue doing whatever I had been doing at the moment. This was despite our moving the art studio from the ground floor of the house closer to the space where we spend most of our time.

It turned out that it didn’t take much time to finish the drawing – only a couple of hours during the Thanksgiving long weekend. One curious thing that I noticed, though, is that sustained focus on drawing requires endurance of sorts, and that my capacity for it diminishes if it is not exercised regularly. Having a long, uninterrupted chunk of time for drawing is a luxury in my case. Yet, I could draw with full focus and “flow” only for about 30 minutes at a time, before beginning to wish for a break.

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Orange shirt day

Yesterday was an “orange shirt day” at my daughter’s school. She was supposed to wear something orange to honour indigenous people, who were forced to go through the residential school system in Canada. Incidentally, yesterday was also a Monday, which is a “number one uniform day” in her school. So she was wondering whether she would still have to wear a tie with her orange T-shirt. I did not know what the rule was, so had to rely on my basic fashion sense: T-shirt + tie = bad.

The funny thing is that the incident that gave the orange shirt day its name had to do with a girl, who had her orange shirt taken away because it did not comply with the residential school rules. And nowadays, we are puzzled about how to break dress code in the most socially acceptable way. Oh, the irony…

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Keep drawing

My daughter’s Grade 2 teacher mentioned an interesting observation: as children grow up, they begin to write more and better. At the same time, they tend to include fewer pictures in their work, because they think it makes their writing look more “grownup“. However, research apparently shows that those kids, who can draw well also become better writers. This is because their visual memory and imagination are more developed, which helps with creating stories and verbal images.

This makes me think, once again, that sketching is a valuable exercise for adults too. The skill of observation, which is arguably the most important skill for scientists, engineers, artists, writers and pretty much anyone involved in creative work, include taking notes. This is the phase where information is converted to knowledge. I read some time ago (I think, in “Smarter Faster Better”) that manipulating the information, engaging with it is the key step. Curiously, it not important how the information is engaged with. As long as we spend time playing with the new data, we are extracting knowledge from it. It is then only logical that sketching complements verbal note-taking by developing our capacity for observing what is going on around us and eventually transmitting what we learn to others.

So here it is, putting theory to practice. This is my daughter amusing herself with a puzzle, while having a snack. The chameleon is imaginary.

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Adult beginners

I am studying violin and piano alongside my six-year-old daughter. We both started from the same level – absolute beginners. Yet at the music store, our lesson books are in different sections. I am classified as an adult beginner, while she is a beginner without a modifier. This made me think whether our experiences of learning music are really that different.

I think we, adult beginners, do approach music differently: we are both more and less serious about it. And in both instances, we are wrong.

On the one hand, being a hobby, music is quite low on the list of adults’ priorities. This prevents them from focussing on the practice completely, instead of worrying at the back of their minds whether they should be doing something else at the moment. By not maintaining the focus, the adult beginners miss an essential component of an optimal (read:enjoyable) experience.

At the same time, and ironically in contradiction to the point above, adults expect too much from the music practice in terms of results. For children, the practice itself is the game. My daughter literally plays music, so it is an autotelic activity for her. I, on the other hand, may be able to convince myself with the logical part of my brain that the practice itself is the goal, but somewhere on the background there is an expectation of a payoff, e.g., improvement of my technique. In other words, I play to learn how to play, and my daughter plays for the sake of playing.

The autotelic quality of an activity, when it derives meaning from itself, is another essential component of an optimal experience. It allows children to stick to music practice week after week and year after year, while most adults quit soon after starting because their goals are different. Actually, children don’t even think in terms of goals; they just play.

…This makes me marvel once again at the depth of Nike’s “Just do it” slogan.

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Focus

One of the necessary conditions for achieving a flow state (when you are so engrossed in an activity that you lose a sense of time, and the challenges you face seem to be perfectly matched by your skill level at any given moment) is the ability to focus on the task at hand. This is easier said than done, and both the ability of the individual and the nature of the activity play significant roles. Apparently, people who are good at concentrating their attention are able to restrict the input of external information that they are processing. In other words, they can filter out everything that is not relevant to the activity. This enables them to enjoy what they are doing instead of constantly questioning whether they should be doing something else.

As I was reading about this in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow” (my favourite recent read), I thought that artists (or authors in any creative field) use the same principle to create a more focused, and therefore more enjoyable, experience for the audience. For example, in photography, we use shallow depth of field to isolate the subject from the background. This way, we do the pre-filtering of the visual input for the viewers, so they have a better visual experience.

Another photography technique that uses the same idea and that I find particularly useful is covering candid environmental portraits to black-and-white. I did it most recently when shooting dance classes at a local studio. In that particular case, while the subjects themselves are photogenic, the background of the dance studio, littered with clothes, shoes and bags of various bright colours, is definitely not. Removing the colour information from the image guides the viewer’s attention to the subject by literally reducing the input bandwidth. I also often use this technique in street photography, where the colours of the background scene are not only impossible to control but also irrelevant to the subject.