Self-Discovery Blues

I wouldn't exactly call my life busy. I work part-time and study here and there, hang out with friends every now and then, nothing the average guy can't handle. That's me, just an average guy. In fact, I think my life is a little insipid so I tend to take things on just to give some variety to my day. For example, I read a tonne of books (my to-read pile is now taller than me), I'm an avid shopper (my credit card is heat-warped) and I play the piano, just to name a few things. And of course, I've started up this blog.

I'm a prospective medical student and assuming all goes well and I finally decide to stick to medicine (but that's a story for another blog entry), I think the way my mind works is very suitable to becoming a doctor. I've heard stories of medical school where your life is pretty much engulfed by it. You have to live it, breath it, dream it because there's such a huge volume of information that needs to become second nature. I know I definitely have the capacity to absorb all that information because I've always been the type that tends to focus on a unified subject and master it rather than having a scattered knowledge of disparate matters.

But aside from medicine, I'm also an avid music lover. Now when I say music, I mean pretty serious music: Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt and so forth. And so it came to no surprise, to me at least, that when I first laid my hands down on those black and white keys at 19, they just made sense to me. So now I can the piano. The only problem with me is that I do everything instinctively. That's not always a good thing because there's no progressive development and honing of skills and technique. After 6 years of frustratingly clumsy finger work, I finally got around to attending my first piano lesson last week.

But to my horror, my piano teacher thought I was pretty good. She then gave me 5 eighth-grade level pieces to learn in a week. Now I know I'm alright at the piano but I'm nowhere near talented enough to learn 5 any-grade pieces in a week. So in my flurry of sudden musical obligation, I've been slaving away at the keys, trying to master the music the best I can. As a result, any attempts at writing a blog entry - and I do have a lot of things I want to write about - have been thwarted. Instead of thoughts of words and sentences, everything I want to say is transmuted into a mental slurry of treble clefs, key signatures and pedal indications.

Amidst my concerns about my retarded writing, it occurred to me that I just made an interesting self-discovery: I'm a uni-tasker. I've always dreamed of being a Renaissance man so it pains me deeply to admit it but I think that's what I am, a uni-tasker. Faced with such a devastating revelation, I lowered my head in shame and wallowed in the despair caused by my inability to multi-task.

But here I am writing an entry. It's not a great entry but the words started to come to me because I picked up my copy of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and lo and behold, the words are flowing, albeit stunted and clumsy. It seems that my mind is elastic: it tends to activate certain abilities according to what I'm focusing my attention on at a given moment. If I continue reading, maybe my mind will recognise that I'm in literature-mode and my writing will pick up again. And that's how I made the second interesting self-discovery: I'm adaptive. I'm cheerful again. I may not be able to do many things at once but I'm able to do many things given the right head-space. Now, I can lift my head up high and poignantly and romantically whisper to myself, "I'm capable. . ."

I'm sitting next to my piano as I write this. I'm a little scared to touch the keys because, having written this, I may have negated 3 days worth of work tortuously trying to elucidate the structural complexities of the two Beethoven sonatas I've been trying to master. I feel my fingers stumbling already.