Recently, I read 鲁迅's 《阿Q正传》 (``The True Stories of Ah Q'' by Lu Xun). It put me in yet another miasma of doubt over the weekend. Allow me to explain why.
I hate Ah Q's guts. His way of thinking, the so-called ``Ah Q 精神'' is so escapist and Pyrrhic in nature that makes me want to just reach in, grab him, attempt to shake some sense into him, only to realise that not only will he not get any sense shaken into him, he'd even turn around and realise some twisted sense of Pyrrhic victory which requires the sort of contortionist thinking that would make any one else cringe in pain. He does not seek to improve, preferring to compare himself only to the downtrodden---those who are his superiors, he grovels and willingly accepts all the bullshit they toss in his direction. He lives life day to day, without any form of real aim, only following things at a very superficial level, never really mastering any sort of skill.
Does that sound familiar?
I may be projecting a little, but the main reason for the miasma of doubt over the weekend is the realisation that ``Ah Q'' might as well be me at times. I've long been a proponent of ``high quality amateurism'' on things that matter but are unrelated to that of one's livelihood---there's a sense of interestingness in mastery of something at one's own leisure as opposed to the need for the ever-strife of improvement necessary just to remain relevant in the professional circle. But what hit me was that ``high quality'' was itself a fast changing goal, and when compared to the professionals, I start seeing the vast discrepancy in effort put in. In more specifics, I was thinking about my music making and dizi playing.
A professional, when not performing, often spends the better part of the 8-hour day practising. He/she spends about an hour or two on technical exercises (e.g. long notes, scales in various interval progressions, ``random'' sight-reading pieces), then maybe up to three hours on deeply practising a piece or two, and whatever time is left is reserved for theory and other reading.
If I'm lucky, I get like one hour per week day to actually practise, with maybe eight hours per weekend if I really push myself, but it's more likely to be four hours on average over the weekend.
Thus, by the time the professional is done with five years of training, he/she has 10k+ hours of time-effort under his/her belt, at a higher intensity too.
What do I have for my 25 years (till now)?
Around 6.5k+ hours of time-effort, as it turns out, or around three years of professional training over a 5-day week with 8-hour days. Bear in mind also that I'm being generous by assuming that I do get my 1 hour per week day; usually I don't train like that.
Yeah, I'm never catching up with them. And in a way, I've gone a little ``Ah Q'' on that, and this realisation just hit me in sort of the wrong way over the wrong period of time.
On most days, not catching up to the professionals does not bug me that much. But on some days, when things in general don't seem to be going right for some reason, the thought hits me rather hard. I think it's the nature of the field and my latent ego. In my regular professional field, individual glories are rare---you try to build a whole system on your own within the time-frame and budget. Naturally, when we succeed, the ego gets a feed, but sometimes the ego is a beast and demands a different form of satiation. In the music field, ego is fed directly through the ``worship'' of individual personalities, since in many cases, it is individual skill that shines above all. Even in the orchestra setting, the individuals contained there-in also have sideline work that allows them to shine on their own---it is just the nature of the field itself.
Perhaps when things aren't going too swimmingly in my regular work (group glories), my ego turns naturally towards the individual sort of glory of music, and then realising that I cannot catch up with the professionals to get the level of glory my ego seeks, falls into the abyss of doubt.
*shrugs*
Yeah, I think that's enough belly-aching for now.
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