My partner informed me she was going back to school.
What was my initial reaction?
Jealousy. Of course then followed up by pure excitement for her.

But the jealousy surprised me!

I graduated in May of 2019, so I’ve only been out of school a year and a summer. So I should be frolicking around, relishing new found freedom, flexing my hard won skills, right?

It’s not so simple.

In school one has access to a network of individuals there to be stretched, teachers and mentors providing guidance and feedback, and assignments requiring you to generate work. An intense building, practice rooms, and a daily commute helped protect the ritual ethic of work. A few paces outside the music building: a library.

What I missed from school was the growth curve. A feeling a being stretched and assimilating vast swaths of information. A place to go, physically and otherwise, to do the work of learning. The wealth of information available at any moment.

What I didn’t miss from school was the socialization, the stress, the pressure, the artificial deadlines, the excess, and the multiplicity (taking 5 classes at a time).

It struck me that I could take myself back to school, too.

But rather than enslaving myself to a bloated collegiate system, I could design my own compact program. It would be rooted in all the tenets of learning I’ve come to understand as essential.

• healthy environment
• robust containers
• deliberate practice
• review
• proactivity vs. reactivity (or creativity over consumption)
• one pointedness
• subtraction
• undulation
• harnessing the unconscious mind

I could study what I deemed to be the most important subjects. I could focus myself on just one topic at a time. I designed a template of study, which, when completed, would demonstrate my own processing, synthesizing, and practicing of the subject I learned. I planned no more than four courses ahead, allowing the serendipity of learning to guide my path. I began to cultivate habits and rituals to slip me into optimal learning states without needing ‘go’ anywhere at all.

I’m in my second month of learning and absolutely loving it. It feels like my full-time job, which in some ways it is.

I’ve been empowered to read the many of the books I’ve always wanted to read and dive into the topics I never had time for. I’m able to do so in a deliberate, deep way because I’m not distracted by other coursework. I only work with one topic at a time so my full body, conscious and unconscious mind are mulling over the same material, pulling in the same direction.

The most difficult part is clearing the space and clarifying the vision for the learning projects. Once there, daily study is a self-reinforcing practice. I wake up wanting to hit the books, or write, or think, or practice.

I discussed in my last post my experimentation with a no-information diet. If you saw the stacks of books I’m carting home from the public library you would think I’ve completely fallen off the wagon. But in many ways it feels the same, or even more effective. I limit myself to only one topic per month. I also limit myself exclusively to long form media: books, long articles, long interview podcasts, documentaries. [I supplement news with the paper NYTimes on Sunday morning.]

The topic singularity and the time required to finish each source feel, in body and mind, like I’m really just working on one big thing. My mind isn’t scrambled from the frenetic context of switching of shallow media consumption on every possible subject handed to me by an algorithm.

I have the first four months figured out, but not further. I’m excited to see where the path takes us.
JULY – micro economics and career capital
AUGUST – deliberate practice in violin teaching
SEPTEMBER – deliberate practice in practice
OCTOBER – 100 hours of lesson observation