Skip to main content

The Pleasure in Doing It

Sometimes I just like having run. After your shower and your coffee it feels good to have run, earlier in the day, and to feel that gentle ache and tiredness in the muscles that comes from having used your body productively. I don't always enjoy running while it's happening, and I HATE the snow.

But running in the snow is such a pleasure.  It's exhilarating.  It's freeing.  It feels like being a kid again, with the icy wind in your face and the triumphant feeling of doing something all by yourself.  Anyone can go out for a jog when it's 65 and sunny, but I was out this morning, in 22 degree weather, with the snow all blowing up in my face, and I met another woman running  - and as we passed each other we both raised our arms like Rocky and cheered for each other, and for ourselves, just filled with the
gleefulness of being in the club. The club of crazies.

This pleasure, the joy of winter running, is hard to come by.  It's HARD to power through the resistance of leaving a warm house.   No part of your body wants to go out there.  No matter how persuasively you try to tell yourself that you'll enjoy it, you know that it's worse outside than inside.  But once you start, for 30 minutes or so it's the best thing ever. 

Similarly, you have to overcome some resistance to practice the oboe.  Soak up a reed, put the thing together, play the first few notes and sometimes you just say "UGH, so this is how it's going to be today."  The pressure feels bad.  The first sounds of the morning are not beautiful.  And it's tempting to put the thing away and go back to bed. 

(Just me? I bet not.)

But there's a reward if you keep going a little bit. If you power through a few minutes of warming up, and you get into a piece of music you like.  Or one that has an interesting challenge.  Or one that makes you feel like someone else.  Or one that makes you feel like yourself.  At those times, the pleasure is not in having practiced, it's in practicing.  When you're in the zone, and you're focused, and you're overcoming resistance - just a little - there's nothing like it and you don't want to stop. 

And it's that magic, that in-the-zone feeling, that only-I-am-in-the-intensity-of-this-moment feeling, that keeps us coming back.  Some months I'm less of a runner, some days I hate the oboe - but I always come back. The pleasure is really in the DOING of it. 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IDRS 2014 - Day Two and OUT

I'm writing my Day Two report while all of my colleagues and friends, new and old, are well into their Day Three experience.  I was terribly sad to leave NYC, and IDRS.  In past years I've found myself sort of oboe-ed out by the third or fourth day, but I was nowhere near that point last night when I had to begin my schlep to the airport.  On the up side, I am home and spent the morning with Zoe and Steve, and I'm safely on the correct side of Lake Michigan well before my concert tonight, which was the important purpose of my travel plans - but there are SO MANY MORE great events happening at NYU.  Best of luck to everyone performing! Yesterday, among other performances, I enjoyed THREE recitals featuring music for oboe and bassoon.  Be prepared for a husband-wife recital coming down the pike in the next year or two, as I loved much of the new music that I heard.  First I enjoyed hearing ToniMarie Marchioni and two of her colleagues from the University ...
4 comments
Read more

Practice+ App - and my FIRST EVER GIVEAWAY

You know how, when you are practicing, you need to have your metronome on your stand and turn it constantly up and down as you work through a technical passage?  And you also want to play in tune, and make sure you are staying consistent with your pitch.  So while your metronome is clicking away on your stand, you also have to turn half-way around to look at the screen of the big tuner which has to be plugged into the wall because it eats batteries otherwise.  And if you also want to record yourself to listen to your progress, you have to have your laptop on with the big mic plugged into it, and that’s on still another surface, so you have to move your stand around so you can orient to all three, and then your giant stack of music-in-progress falls off the stand and onto the floor and out of order and the next ten minutes are spent not practicing at all but just trying to return to normalcy. Does this sound familiar? I was sent a free promo copy (full disclosure) of an...
4 comments
Read more

Ewazen Concerto This Very Weekend!

Here's the notice I just sent out about this weekend's event.   If you would like to be on my email list, please do join it in the right sidebar - I will never send spam but I will keep you well informed about my upcoming performances, with occasional emails like this.  Of course I do always mention them in this blog too, but sometimes people prefer info to be RIGHT IN THEIR INBOXES... What's going on? This Friday night, November 18 at 8 I will perform with the Notre Dame Symphony Orchestra at DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.  The piece is a great favorite of mine, Eric Ewazen's Down a River of Time .   If you haven't seen this orchestra you are in for a treat, and if you haven't heard the Ewazen then LOOK OUT! I am truly looking forward to this performance and hope to see you there!  Ticket information can be found HERE .  Please feel free to forward this notice widely! What is this gorgeous concerto about? The title of this piece comes from a...
Post a Comment
Read more