Does anything come naturally to anyone?
Throughout most of my education I was the top of my class. Most things that were taught in school came to me "naturally". I'm not sure what that means exactly except to say that I picked up the concepts fairly easily, could usually make further educated guess based on what was taught to me, and had no trouble applying concepts to solving/analyzing hypothetical problems. For most of that time struggling to learn was something that I watched other people do - not something I had intimate personal experience with. On occasion when I "struggled" to come to grips with something complex, I usually did it in isolation and privacy, with my head stuck in a book in my room late at night, or at the library (Derrida comes to mind). But these were the exceptions rather than the rule. What I specifically do not remember much is other people getting things while I struggled to understand them. Until I went to Oxford, that is. Then there was a lot of people who seemed to get things as quickly if not more so, which was really kind of scary.
Learning rhythm and dancing has kind of been the opposite experience and I really struggle with my pride. I hate struggling with a move in a class. I hate it when other people pick up rhythms or hear them in a song more quickly than I do. I hate it because I don't know how to deal with being the second person to understand something. I hate it because it seems to call into doubt something that I've always been.
There are two aspects to dancing, in my mind - one is about physical agility and coordination and the other about the relationship to music which is in part analytical. To some people I observe these abilities seem much more innate. I'm not sure if I'm physically agile - I think I'm slightly above average but definitely not close to the top. As for musicality I started out a total dunce. Quite honestly in my first performance when I was asked to raise my hat on 5 I didn't know what that meant, and couldn't understand it when they tried to explain.
In my recollections music was never in beats in my head in those days. It reminds me of the argument that the word blue didn't exist because it wasn't a thing until humans could reliably reproduce that colour. I feel that way about music. When I hear the rhythms in music it's not because of some innate connection with it, but because I'm trained my mind to detect patterns and apply some kind of analytical tool that lets me distinguish where it's at. Now when I listen to music, the counts literally sings itself to me in some part of my brain. Which is why it's very challenging and scary sometimes when I find a song that confuses me, because my rhythm detection is thrown off by half a beat or by two beats. At times like this I do what I've always done. Ask someone who knows, and then take it home as homework. I sit in front of the computer listening to these tunes over and over, counting them out to myself, waiting for the correct information to overwrite the incorrect information. I feel like I'm trying to grow instincts - or at least, to train myself until it becomes instinctive.
The asking someone though, costs me pride. I don't know if I was always this bad in school (heck it was a long time ago) but I just feel really negative when I don't get something - especially if I have to resort to asking a peer rather than a teacher. That was just never me. I was the one who others went to ask, not the one who did the asking.
The thing is I don't really like this aspect of myself. What is wrong with not understanding something? Surely where we begin is immaterial - the important thing is where we end up. If we don't start where we want to end up (most of us don't, I assume), then we have to do whatever it takes to get there. And once we do - does it matter where we started? I keep trying to tell myself that whatever it is I am not, I am not yet, because I'm in the process of becoming.
Perhaps it is also to do with insecurity. Just as I hate asking people to come out and dance when I DJ because I hate the feeling of needing to ask for something. I hate being disempowered whether it is needing their help in terms of coming to my events or in terms of teaching me some move or anything else. I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels this way though, and I would very much like to come to terms with being someone who has needs. I'd like to be able to express my needs and my regard for the people who bring things to my life (friends who teach me, who come support my events, who practice with me etc.), without a ridiculous sense of disempowerment - because I think it isn't disempowering. We just need people. That's all there is to it. It's no shame and no weakness. One day hopefully I can just ask for whatever it is I need without feeling my my pride is in the way, and if I don't get whatever it is I ask for, I can take it in context and not let it affect me in a personal way.
Also it just occurred to me that the toughest thing is to refrain from drawing any conclusions from the fact that someone can do/can understand something which doesn't come naturally to you. How I feel is "whoa this person is such a natural I bet I'll never be as good of a dancer as him/her" when in fact I have no clear conception of the circumstances which may have gone into making of this situation. Perhaps he/she is innately awesome (in which case, yay, good for this person), but perhaps he/she has just had a lot more practice or some kind of formal training. I think back now to all the kids that I watched struggle in calculus class. No doubt some of them simply came to the conclusion that I was "smart" and they were perhaps less so. I always felt at the time that there was something erroneous about this conclusion (because I see them being smart at other things, and most of them were def. more socially adept than I was at the time). Now I think I know that part of the error is not seeing why I performed well in calculus (because I was tutored in maths from an early age quite separately and additional to my formal education, and because I had no social life and devoted free time to solving whatever extra physics and calculus problems I could lay my hands on in order to feel extra prepared for exams because otherwise I'd freak out because I'm a control freak and couldn't ever just try to 'wing it'). So yeah, there's always so much that we don't see.
Throughout most of my education I was the top of my class. Most things that were taught in school came to me "naturally". I'm not sure what that means exactly except to say that I picked up the concepts fairly easily, could usually make further educated guess based on what was taught to me, and had no trouble applying concepts to solving/analyzing hypothetical problems. For most of that time struggling to learn was something that I watched other people do - not something I had intimate personal experience with. On occasion when I "struggled" to come to grips with something complex, I usually did it in isolation and privacy, with my head stuck in a book in my room late at night, or at the library (Derrida comes to mind). But these were the exceptions rather than the rule. What I specifically do not remember much is other people getting things while I struggled to understand them. Until I went to Oxford, that is. Then there was a lot of people who seemed to get things as quickly if not more so, which was really kind of scary.
Learning rhythm and dancing has kind of been the opposite experience and I really struggle with my pride. I hate struggling with a move in a class. I hate it when other people pick up rhythms or hear them in a song more quickly than I do. I hate it because I don't know how to deal with being the second person to understand something. I hate it because it seems to call into doubt something that I've always been.
There are two aspects to dancing, in my mind - one is about physical agility and coordination and the other about the relationship to music which is in part analytical. To some people I observe these abilities seem much more innate. I'm not sure if I'm physically agile - I think I'm slightly above average but definitely not close to the top. As for musicality I started out a total dunce. Quite honestly in my first performance when I was asked to raise my hat on 5 I didn't know what that meant, and couldn't understand it when they tried to explain.
In my recollections music was never in beats in my head in those days. It reminds me of the argument that the word blue didn't exist because it wasn't a thing until humans could reliably reproduce that colour. I feel that way about music. When I hear the rhythms in music it's not because of some innate connection with it, but because I'm trained my mind to detect patterns and apply some kind of analytical tool that lets me distinguish where it's at. Now when I listen to music, the counts literally sings itself to me in some part of my brain. Which is why it's very challenging and scary sometimes when I find a song that confuses me, because my rhythm detection is thrown off by half a beat or by two beats. At times like this I do what I've always done. Ask someone who knows, and then take it home as homework. I sit in front of the computer listening to these tunes over and over, counting them out to myself, waiting for the correct information to overwrite the incorrect information. I feel like I'm trying to grow instincts - or at least, to train myself until it becomes instinctive.
The asking someone though, costs me pride. I don't know if I was always this bad in school (heck it was a long time ago) but I just feel really negative when I don't get something - especially if I have to resort to asking a peer rather than a teacher. That was just never me. I was the one who others went to ask, not the one who did the asking.
The thing is I don't really like this aspect of myself. What is wrong with not understanding something? Surely where we begin is immaterial - the important thing is where we end up. If we don't start where we want to end up (most of us don't, I assume), then we have to do whatever it takes to get there. And once we do - does it matter where we started? I keep trying to tell myself that whatever it is I am not, I am not yet, because I'm in the process of becoming.
Perhaps it is also to do with insecurity. Just as I hate asking people to come out and dance when I DJ because I hate the feeling of needing to ask for something. I hate being disempowered whether it is needing their help in terms of coming to my events or in terms of teaching me some move or anything else. I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels this way though, and I would very much like to come to terms with being someone who has needs. I'd like to be able to express my needs and my regard for the people who bring things to my life (friends who teach me, who come support my events, who practice with me etc.), without a ridiculous sense of disempowerment - because I think it isn't disempowering. We just need people. That's all there is to it. It's no shame and no weakness. One day hopefully I can just ask for whatever it is I need without feeling my my pride is in the way, and if I don't get whatever it is I ask for, I can take it in context and not let it affect me in a personal way.
Also it just occurred to me that the toughest thing is to refrain from drawing any conclusions from the fact that someone can do/can understand something which doesn't come naturally to you. How I feel is "whoa this person is such a natural I bet I'll never be as good of a dancer as him/her" when in fact I have no clear conception of the circumstances which may have gone into making of this situation. Perhaps he/she is innately awesome (in which case, yay, good for this person), but perhaps he/she has just had a lot more practice or some kind of formal training. I think back now to all the kids that I watched struggle in calculus class. No doubt some of them simply came to the conclusion that I was "smart" and they were perhaps less so. I always felt at the time that there was something erroneous about this conclusion (because I see them being smart at other things, and most of them were def. more socially adept than I was at the time). Now I think I know that part of the error is not seeing why I performed well in calculus (because I was tutored in maths from an early age quite separately and additional to my formal education, and because I had no social life and devoted free time to solving whatever extra physics and calculus problems I could lay my hands on in order to feel extra prepared for exams because otherwise I'd freak out because I'm a control freak and couldn't ever just try to 'wing it'). So yeah, there's always so much that we don't see.
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