Lou's Blog

I have other things I need to work on (who doesn't), but I learned long ago that if I just write what demands to be written first, everything else comes more easily.

I asked one of my guitar students recently if he'd ever had the experience of starting to play and then “waking up” afterwards. I was greeted with squinty eyes and an unspoken expectation that he was about to endure another of my barely-comprehensible philosophical discussions. Dang. I know he plays sports, so I tried that angle. “Have you ever made a great play, but only realized it after the play was done and the point was scored?” Bupkus. Ever the intrepid teacher, I forged on:

I call the experience “checking out,” but athletes and others call it “being in the zone.” [footnote] I've been fortunate enough to have the experience as a performer, as a programmer, as an athlete (though calling myself an athlete strains the word to its bursting point), and as a writer. When performing, the experience was absolutely one of starting the song and then “waking up” afterwards. To this day I have only fuzzy memories of those performances and only know that at those times I played as well as I possibly could. There's an aspect of letting one's self get lost in the act; maybe it's more accurate to say “surrendering” to the music or the task. It is meditative, but a meditation in motion, where I am simultaneously in and out of my body. Even better: I'm getting out of my own way.

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I'll explore this further very soon, but I have to run to a lesson.

It's fair to note that others may have different experiences or articulate them differently, but my own experiences are similar enough to those I've read about that I feel comfortable attempting to share them.