Eating an elephant

One of the many fatuous management phrases you come across these days is the one about change management and any hugely big task: how do you eat an elephant? The, not particularly amusing, answer is "a teaspoon at a time". The idea is that any really big job can be tackled if taken in small enough  pieces. Well, learning the pipes is certainly an elephant of a job, and sometimes I do feel as though I am proceeding at a teaspoon-sized rate.

But, really, what kind of an idiot thinks they can get through an entire elephant with a teaspoon? Fair enough if you don't mind which side of the end of the century you're finishing it, but personally I have a limited amount of time. How many five minute practices would it take me to hit the fabled 10,000 hours? I think I've mentioned this before. Even at 20 minutes a day it works out as the rest of  my life, assuming I reach the same old age attained by my great aunts and grandmother, and then some.

And I do wonder if actually there is value, apart from clocking up the hours, in playing for longer. Obviously playing for longer helps build up stamina. Clearly I will never have to play non stop for an hour, but I suppose it's the same as cars being able to go much faster than the legal limit. It means that when you are at the legal limit the car is well within its comfort zone, and if I can play for an hour non-stop, for instance, then 20 minutes or so should be a doddle, as should playing for 5 or 10 minutes at a time in chunks over a longer period.

Stamina aside I wonder if it helps to have time to go over, and over, and over a tune. To play something, or several somethings, else and then play the tune again and again. Does that speed up the learning process or is it better to play something and then leave it? Sometimes when I play in this way I feel I get better each time, but equally often, it seems, I get steadily worse, or improve to a certain point and then lose it totally. I remember from exam revision days we were told that you can only concentrate for 20 minutes at a time and should take a short break after that, and then breaks of increasing length interspersed with shorter periods of work, then begin again after a long break. Sometimes when I repeat a tune endlessly, break with another tune and go back to the first things have got better. And some times they have got worse, often quite a lot worse. I can literally got from almost having a tune and just fiddling about with the finer points of gracing to having not a clue how even to start the tune. (The fan has noted before that I am living proof of the fact that just because you can do a thing once doesn't mean you can do it again...)

Generally speaking I play until something else becomes pressing (dinner in the oven, the phone ringing), or I get tired, or I get really frustrated and fed up with playing . Sometimes I can work through frustration, discomfort, memory blocks and sheer idiocy, and sometimes I can't.

Whether it's a teaspoon, a ladle or a JCB, there is still an awful lot of elephant to be eaten.

(Can you believe - my 400th blog post!! No wonder I don't have enough time to play pipes!!)