Diagnosis

One of the things I sometimes do at  work is to manage projects. I rather like projects. There is a buzz about them. Everything is new, everyone is interested. You call meetings and attend other people's meetings to tell them all about it. You get new stuff done, made, sorted, up and running. You report on milestones. Everything is alway going forward, and even the set backs are a phase, something to fix and move on from. Everyone takes note, everyone gets involved. I feel as though I am in the middle of things, doing something real, something worthwhile. I like feeling that at least in part of my job the outcome is something I can point at with a stick. See that? That's what I did today. (This last is really important to me because on a day to day basis I'd be hard pressed to explain what I've done of any worth, what difference I've made.)

The bit I don't like about projects is...the end, or, as it is usually known, business as usual. It's that point where whatever you've done stops being the new thing and moves to being just part of the everyday. It takes a while: it doesn't happen in a flash on tbe day the project officially closes. It starts a while before that and can carry on for perhaps a year or so afterwards, but eventually whatever you created or instigated is just part of the furniture. The buzz of newness has gone. No matter how complex, time consuming, irritating or downright wrong things were before the project, no matter how much easier, faster, efficient, safer, cleaner, effective things are after the project everyone forgets the before and maybe even starts to whinge about the after....

And I think that is what has happened to my piping. I had a project which was learning to pipe. It involved doing lots of new things that I could point at with stick: playing by heart, playing tunes back to back, playing with others. It all had the buzz of the new. And now, I've in no way finished learning, but I've moved to to the state where playing pipes is something that I take for granted that I do: business as usual.