on saturday, my husband turned 30 and we had a small collection of friends over for a dinner party to celebrate. late into the night, my two pianist friends get talking about their students, conversation starts trickling towards everyone’s musical exploits (surprising amount of trumpet players in the group) when someone notices the flute case on our desk: “whose is that?” yes, all. i have reached my party-trick era…

Since publishing, I’ve thought more about my blog post from last week, and how I’ve been so focused on my end goal of having definitively learned the things that I semi-randomly set out to do at the beginning of the semester. I talked about being closer to that goal no matter what – even if I stopped today – but I hadn’t really considered that I might have learned enough to go further, to try other things. I thought about how my work has started to skew more demonstrative, and I’ve been less attentive to embedding a growth mindset towards my practice as a whole. So I got back into the journey element. How do I know if I’m looking at the process, not the result?

I found an article that helped build my understanding of being in the “not yet” phase of mastery, and one phrase hit me over the head: celebrating growth doesn’t mean you’ve reached the end. I’ve been reflecting on how I have approached education (and moreso, demonstrating my learning) over my lifetime by prioritizing outcomes. This is common, I think, when we are focusing on grades. I wanted to get the best grades in every subject in high school because I saw test scores as tools to get me to university rather than prove my proficiency. But I think it went a little deeper than that, too. When I took music classes as a kid, I wanted to be able to play the piece without mistakes. When I was in theatre, I wanted to be able to memorize my lines for showcase. I gave up a lot of the time because I wasn’t being kind to myself through the hard yards of reaching my goals, and my goals were always about getting to some faraway target instead of loving and appreciating how I spent my time (reading, writing, bringing imagined colour and sound into reality, learning, connecting). I didn’t notice that change was happening all around me, all the time.

So in this order: over the weekend word gets out that I am learning how to play the flute, and after my friends have a go, I get my hands on it. When I’m at my desk studying on Monday, I’m feeling pretty hyped about this cool thing I’m learning to do, so in order to delay researching behaviour management in high-needs primary classrooms, I open the case to “get some fresh air.” I’m hitting low notes that I hadn’t been able to before. I breeze through my scales and my practice piece in fairly short order, so I Google “easy flute songs sheet music.” Friends, I’m flying high at this point. Wednesday, I get feedback from my music teacher about my progress so far. It feels like over the past couple months I’ve been soliciting everyone I know to tell me that you can’t master the flute in one fell swoop, and they do tell me that, but it hits different when my professor says so but things are looking good and I should keep going. How did we get here???

It also could have been the right combination of practice doing its sweet thing, and getting (slowly) over the Seven Week Cold, and leaning into my strength of sight reading over slogging through breath work for the umpeenth time, and loving the song Danny Boy and letting that influence how fired up I was getting. I can’t know. But I went through a dozen of my favourite songs that I could find and reader, I was playing music. For all the times that I have jokingly, but perhaps still accurately, described my flute practice as honking – this time I was playing music.

I thought that I would just play a few songs off of sheet music and put a lil’ bow on it – I hadn’t realized that I would actually whisk away 20 minutes having a good time. Maybe my favourite tune is actually Nearer, My God, to Thee??? I played Danny Boy with more feeling than precision last time, which I preferred.
For the sake of moving forward from my last practice video, which was carefully edited, here’s a totally unedited look at my practice – squeaks, re-starts, scrolling through sheet music, and … very unfortunately … both horrible posture, and scratching my nose pretty often. (I apologize!!!)
As always, sections are divvied up, so roll through songs as you’d like (including a first attempt of Fur Elise… like, who is she??!)


So what does celebrating look like to me? In most cases, treats, but in this case, free play. Time to express without expectation. Sharing what I can do (my husband got a long talking-to about why Danny Boy is a poetic phenomenon). Taking it seriously because I enjoy it, but enjoying it by not taking it so seriously.