Progress or fade out
Ellie's been learning piano for a year now, she's doing pretty good. She's now preparing for her concert piece to play at the Sydney Opera House later this year. Last year she progressed very well, as I was commited to sit with her for her practice every day, and she had a lot of time home. This year she started school, and apart from school, she still has dance, drawing, swimming, tennis, drama lessons to go to, so I find she slowed down a lot with piano. And when we started our new business, I find my time with her for the piano practice has to cut down again. Her teacher wasn't happy and I had to explain to her that it's not Ellie's fault, I just haven't got the time. I have a baby that just gets too excited when she hears the piano's making any noise and she's determined to not leave us alone, and Peter always gets home too late.
She has a problem. She learns very fast, but she forgets very fast,too. She learns to play a new song and she forgets an old one. Generally speaking, if she practises twice a week, that'll just keep her where she's at: no learning, no forgetting. No practise for that week, she forgets everything straight away, have to start all over again; more than twice, she'll make progress, of course, the more the merrier. Sometimes, I feel like fighting a battle, if you don't keep progressing, your losing. At times I have attempted to take a break, but her teacher and also my brother(who's a very good piano teacher in China)strongly opposed the idea. They told me, if we take a break, it won't be long at all that she'll have to start from the very beginning again, and all the effort before would be in vain.
This reminds me of other things in life. A lot of times we start doing something. At the beginning, there's ususally a lot of passion, and also there's a lot of action. But after a while, the passion starts to fade, and the action starts to slow down. And then we're attempted to take a break, (if we could), or just keep it at minimum. A lot of the times we don't realise that we're like riding a boat against a flow: if we don't progress, we regress. The minimum action required will just keep us where we're at, but that won't make us progress. If we want to progress, we have to put in extra action and keep on the good effort; and if we take a break or stop, the flow will move us backwards, and pretty soon we'll find out there's just too much to catch up and have to give up the whole thing. Not too many people actually decided to stop wilfully at the first place. Most of the times it happened because they slowed down, took a break, and before they knew it, they faded out.
Friday, August 15, 2003
