AARP’s E mails sometimes contain interesting sub-heads, so I clicked on the 5 banks most likely to fail in the near future and they were all locals in southern states, so I clicked out.

I clicked on why I shouldn’t want to win the lottery and learned that people who had, had gotten divorced, had been murdered by jealous relatives, had wound up broke, and, ominously at the end, “Do you see this pattern?” Well, yes, if you win the lottery and you are already a loser mentally and emotionally, you might get hysterical and spend all your money on stupid things and brag to the wrong people. If you have learned about yourself and are constant in your philosophy, those things are highly unlikely to happen to you or because of you.

Of course, if those you are close to develop “you owe me” personalities, that is something you can’t control. So, as my pal at Frills Boutique said to me recently, if she won, she wouldn’t tell anyone.

So, bring it on Money Gods, I’m ready.

Something Randy said in his post, about how long it has taken people to catch on to medical breakthroughs, got me thinking about the learning process. Not historical ones, such as his story about its taking 50 years for people to catch on about how to treat scurvy, but ones that have come up in my experience.

Even when you are not studying something on a conscious level, you have to be open to picking up intelligent tips from the world, to be receptive. My friend, who studied piano when I did, at Chicago Musical College, considered herself very musically knowledgeable, way ahead of me. Her constant tilting at her teachers because she was smarter, did her in, and she plays now not at all. In piano, as I discovered when I was studying on my own, you can spin your wheels and finally get discouraged because nothing you do works. Big pieces require big technique. Big technique requires real training. I was lucky to finally work with Sophie, who made a musician out of me.

When my friend visited New York, she came along with me to Sophie’s and sat quietly in the corner, observing the experience of a lesson with "a major musical pedagogue.” Later she said she didn’t know how I could stand the constant nitpicking and criticism and if it had been her, she would have told her off. And I am thinking “and learned nothing”. My approach to Sophie when she was in her “I am God” persona was, “Listen to what she is saying, not how she is saying it.” I did break with her once because her methods were having a bad effect on me and I was avoiding the piano. This, I thought, will not do. During the hiatus I interviewed with a couple of teachers with outsized egos and not a shred of what Sophie had to offer. So I reconnected with Sophie and she had changed toward me, so I got the benefit of her more benign self.

Later, my friend sat at my piano and tried to recreate a piece she had once played. As I watched her hands, I wondered how she had ever been able to play anything at all. She had no technique. Even if you are rusty, if you had technique at one time, it would show. In our young days I hadn’t really monitored her playing and did not have the knowledge to judge it then. But all this time later I really do know a lot and it dismayed me to realize how she had struggled for all those years and learned little.

My friend acknowledges her lack of skill but believes it is because she had no time for her studies while raising children and, later, while struggling to survive after being widowed. Her mother constantly belittled her, thought, because I grew up in a poor neighborhood, that I was not the right sort of friend. Her reaction was to resist all authority and consequently, all teaching.

There is no doubt that she is musical and understands what she hears. She could have been successful but her rebellion made it impossible. She threw out the good with the bad.

When Sophie would show me a way to “get” something, whether it was a physical trick to train the hand, or a way of seeing the composer’s intention, or would teach a relaxation lesson by holding on to my arms as I played, I would often think, “Of course, that is so simple, why didn’t I think of that?”

True learning often involves cutting away the clutter that surrounds the problem, a kind of common sense. I sometimes think that as I am leaving this life, I'll struggle up, I'll stare into the unknown, and I'll cry out, "I've got it, the true meaning of ...arrrgghhh."


xx, Teal