On Learning Curves

Last Friday evening, I took my daughters to their first ‘Open Mic’ night. Their piano teacher sets these up a few times a year so students can showcase their pieces they’ve been working on.

It had rained on our way there, and the air was heavy and humid when we got out of the car. My daughters skipped through the puddles in their sandals, French braids flying and dresses fluttering. Having left the babies with my husband, our toes and our spirits felt like they had just shed weight.

In the Episcopal church where their teacher gives lessons, we let our hearts soar to different pieces of music.  It was incredible that so many students who were new to piano could already give the gift of magic that art produces. My daughters rested their heads on my shoulders, and I breathed in the happiness of the moment, when we were suspended above our busy lives.

On the way home, we got to talking about creativity, and art, and learning curves. One of my daughters had made a mistake on her piece and was feeling deflated.  I told her what my guitar teacher told me in my 20’s that has helped me so much ever since – Respect Your Learning Curve. (I can barely play a song but all of my guitar lessons were worth it to understand this one lesson.) I had recently read an article on How To Get Through the Not So Graceful Beginnings that I thought might help my daughter so we read it on the way home.

One of the students played Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man’ and I told the girls about an interview I saw with Billy Joel on Oprah. He said that he never let the muse lead him to the piano. Rather, he had set times he showed up to the piano every day and let the muse decide if she wanted to meet him there.

It was helpful for me to revisit these truths about creativity.

I am almost 12 years into mothering, and what I know so acutely is that mothers need a creative outlet like they need air. I was lucky enough to have read a book while I was pregnant with my first son called ‘Women First, Family Always’  that laid out the idea that a woman needs to be connected to her soul, her husband, and her children in order to thrive. If one of these three connections is weak, all the others suffer.

I think it was possibly one of the greatest graces of my life to have read this before having children. It meant that I always knew that pursuing my passions – whether it was writing or cooking or praying or running – would always strengthen the other roles I had.  It helped me understand the dull, gnawing feeling that something was off when my husband and I hadn’t really talked in a while. If I needed to write. If I needed to connect with one of my kids. And that all of these were important.

It gave me the idea that in the family unit, everyone needed to thrive, including the mother. Yes, there are seasons where you aren’t thriving, your surviving, for sure (I’m looking at you, Michael for waking up three times last night teething). Still, knowing how to paddle back to something that resembles thriving (writing, reading a book, eating a sandwich sitting down) is the only way to avoid capsizing.

But here’s the thing – six months into having twins, I had forgotten ALL of these truths.

Yes, it’s understandable that sleep deprivation and some serious high-level mothering and sacrificing have been running the show to the exclusion of so much else this season. But that wasn’t the reason I hadn’t written.

It was because I had gotten rejected.

I had sent out my second book to a handful of agents and they passed.

I just barely scratched the surface of the list of agents I had, but I had forgotten that this is part of the process. Getting rejected. And so I had shut down. I had stopped trying. Stopped showing up at the piano to see if the muse would meet me there. I made the excuse that the twins were a lot, I’ll try later. But the truth was that I had let the oldest saboteur of creativity infect me: fear.

To do anything creative, you have to be fine with getting a lot of nos. With silence. With mistakes. With no attention. With a lot of doors slammed. With screwing up at recitals and still going back again the next week. Its all part of the process.

And if you give up, if you don’t engage with the process, you’ll suffer. It will look like crankiness and eating too much sugar. But its just your creativity trying to break out. So give it a place to go. Don’t give up on it when you get uncomfortable or you think you don’t look good.

Our ride home from the Open Mic night reminded me of the vitality of pursing something creative. Giving it a chance, letting it infect you, from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. Even if you fail. Especially if you fail.

And there is something important about recognizing this yes, at the not so graceful beginnings of things. But its also important to recognize it at the not so graceful middles of things too.

Sometimes learning curves are steepest at the beginning. And sometimes re-learning curves are really heavy and hard to lift in the middle of the journey too. That’s when we need to look around to the bright lights out there to help us with the heavy lifting. To other thinkers and writers that say you have to do a lot of bad work to get to the good work. To podcasts that remind you that failure is part of the process so get comfortable. To new piano students who remind us of the magic of listening to someone else play.