Beeing helpful

I’m so excited!! This afternoon I signed up for piano lessons for the fall. That might sound boring…but these aren’t your typically piano lessons. First, I signed up for group lessons, which means that there will be 12 of us taking the lesson at once. Digital pianos with headphones make this possible – and these are some sweet pianos that are touch-sensitive and don’t sound midi-ish at all. I really think that the peer pressure and collaborative efforts during lessons will be good for me. Second, these lessons are on piano improvisation techniques (for several genres of music) and are therefore going to be the first non-classical piano lessons I’ve ever had. I love classical music, but it’s hard to just sit down at a piano and bust out a Rachmaninoff prelude when you really just want to dabble in sounds or pick out a song you’ve heard on the radio. We’re starting the lessons with two weeks of 12-bar blues techniques, which is so sweet. Well, I should say that it’s sweet as long as I’m not coerced into scat singing again like I was when I first learned blues theory in a college course…:)

I experienced a lot of emotion when I visited the piano studio (today was the studio’s open house). See, this studio is being opened by our church’s pianist Ben, who’s an absolutely incredible player. He just graduated from MSU with his master’s degree (in piano performance), and is making a major transition from student to teacher. And our church, our huge huge hard-to-get-to-know-anyone church, is being soooo supportive. We said some prayers for Ben at the end of mass today, and then I saw many familiar faces at the open house this afternoon. It was nice to chat with them for a bit and see Ben being swamped with eager kids and adults for all of his various classes. This should also be an opportunity to get to know some musical people from my church, which will be nice – for example, our new music director is taking the improv lessons with me!

Anyway, I really like to see groups of people supporting individuals within (and outside of) the group. When this happens, I see people feeling more confident of their ability to help and more giving of their time and support. We learn that we don’t have to do everything – rather, each person can contribute in one or two small ways. And this knowledge often moves us from feeling overwhelmed and frozen in place to becoming helpful and mobile. When these individually-chosen contributions are combined, a close-knit web of support emerges.

In biology and robotics, this emergent sort of phenomenon is called “self-organization,” and it’s some really cool stuff. I have to remember to apply some of my research goals/musings and geeky social insect knowledge to humans more often, because it’s interesting to think about across a wide variety of topics. :)