Modern Cavemen

There is a sense of satisfaction in conquering a new skill; in mastering something you never tried before. When I was a lad, I wrestled with the most difficult sleight-of-hand I could find, and how good it felt once I broke through the wall of my personal limits and learned to perform those moves perfectly. Performing the effect for other people never felt as good--often other people couldn't appreciate the work that went into the effect--but nothing could detract from that sense of accomplishment you get from acquiring something you didn't have before.

I think this is because endocrinologically speaking, we're not that far removed from our paleolithic ancestors. We crave challenges, and lacking mammoth hunts and fleeing from saber-tooth tigers, and having our needs met by convenient stores and other luxuries, we seek these thrills where we can. The more physical types engage in sports, lifting weights, running long miles. The cerebrals wrestle with crossword puzzles or Sudoku. Or take up piano in mid-life to keep their brains soft and moist.

I fear that calcification of the brain. My great-grandmother was 102 when she died, and autonomous, but she had slipped a little. Granted, she did well for herself. She lived in her own home, drew water from a pump, dug coal from a small vein, but she also nurtured a plastic ivy plant while swearing it grew, and tried for years to remove a "stain" from our coffee table which was a hole through which you could see the floor. My family thought these idiosyncrasies were cute. I thought the idea of the cheese sliding from your cracker when you got old was horrifying and I swore, as a little kid, to be dead by age fifty.

Well, here I am, and still walking the skin of the earth like the spectre of Hamlet's father, and still semi-functional. Rather than pushing up daisies, or poaching college-age women in an attempt to recapture something I never had in the first place, I'm studying music to stave off senility.

It's good to experience that sense of satisfaction again when I conquer a difficult passage of music that i can't play at first. The cool thing about music is that you get immediate feedback. You can hear when you get it right. You're your own audience. When it comes together it sounds and feels right and everything's fine.

Senility will just have to wait another fifty years.