Push Through the Pain

As Malik plowed through the middle part of his piano piece, fumbling here and stumbling there, I gave him a nudge and then exclaimed, “You have to push through your pain! Don’t stop!”

His playing was laden with mistakes in the middle of the piece. That’s when I received a revelation.

“Huh? What are you talking about? What does that even mean?” Malik, at 11 years of age, is very intuitive. He looked up at me wide-eyed as if he’d done something wrong. Then, he caught my eye, and a half smile emerged. He knew what was coming next.

No, he wasn’t in any pain and didn’t allow his mistakes to set him back. He heard where they were and went back to correct them. When he did that, however, he kept making the same mistakes. I wanted him to play through—to push through.

He looked up at me, awaiting my explanation. “There are three responses to pain or a “hard” challenge: 1) give up, 2) work through it slowly no matter how long it takes, and 3) push yourself with the “beat” of a partner.

Pushing through the pain – or I’ll state it another way since I’m talking about a music lesson here, though its principle is applicable in any “hard” scenario – playing through the mistakes – pulls so much out of us and also shows us our deficiency. Let’s see…

Perseverance. Resistance. Consistency. Inconsistency. Laziness. Fortitude. Resilence.

It shows us who and what we are made of. It also shows what we need to grow in or what we need to let go of. Which way do you go when a challenging situation is before you? Do you go to the left? The right? Or sit still? Do you give up too afraid or, perhaps, too lazy to tackle the difficulty before you?

Are you comfortable being complacent and not moving forward? Or will you embrace the challenge head-on toward maturity? I am right now reminded of James 1:4:

Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

“You have to push through your pain…”  Oh, but how do we do this?

Malik was polishing Musette, the last piece in Suzuki Book 1 Piano. The piece is in the key of D minor. Its form is ABA. The middle section – the B section – changes to the 5th of D, giving us a brief, beautiful, major-sounding rise in tonality. This piece is at the end of Book 1 and marks a transition from the C and G Major that precede it. Before delving into this piece, Malik learned the 5-note Major patterns in most keys with sharps that make up the Major pentascale. This led to a brief exercise about the tetrachord, the basis for scales. I love teaching on tetrachords! But I digress.

Musette is a beautiful piece in 6/8 time. I don’t know its story. The composer is unknown; however, expressions and symbols related to its musicality are indicated within the music. When my students learn this piece or any, I layer their learning with questions like, “What story do you think the composer is telling? How would you express it? In what ways can you show the story as you play it?”

But Malik wasn’t yet ready for this as ” pain ” was in his stumbling. To convey the story, he had to let go by pushing through. In short, he had first to learn the piece to tell its story.  Learning involves embracing mistakes and not tolerating them.

What story is waiting to come out of you?

When he was learning the B section, he kept stumbling. We broke that line down into two parts, starting with the latter half comprised of those harmonic intervals. This is where it goes into the Major mode of the melodic minor. Yeah! He nailed it. For some reason, though, the first part of that line, which is melodically driven as both hands move in contrary motion, caused the “pain” in his stumbling. When trying to connect both parts, it fell apart.

Partnering
First, I saw that he was playing too fast. His fingers couldn’t yet keep up with where his brain was. I said, “Okay. Slow down! Think it through.” Then I put the beat on as my hands became a metronome in the slow tempo of 6. My direction was simple: “The eighth note gets the beat. Play slowly to the beat. Should you make a mistake, keep going.”

It is often the case that when mistakes are made, we want to stop. Why?

Because we are upset that we made a mistake. 

We feel that we cannot go on until we are mistake-free. It has to be perfect, or it’s not good enough. We are perfectionists who get disheveled when something goes wrong, so we stop.

Not healthy.

Mistakes will happen. It is part of the learning process. Sometimes, stopping and figuring out what caused you to stumble is good. Think it through. Dissect. Analyze. Then engage. Other times, you need to push through the pain of the mistake to see what caused you to stumble in the first place. Learn through it.

As Malik played to the metronomic beat of my hands, he made a few mistakes and wanted to stop. I said, “Keep going.” And he did. In this way, he finally understood my excitement when I nudged him earlier and said, “You have to push through your pain!”