Can You Be Too Old To Learn How To Ski? Well, actually, yeah, probably, now that I think of it.

Joanne Shaw Taylor--"Who Do You Want Me To Be?" (mp3)



The following is adapted from some comments on life-long learning that I made to the student body this morning:



There was a time when I thought I was destined to be the next Jimi Hendrix. I was about to get a guitar, I was left-handed, I had cool hair, and, well, look at me, I rocked. And I could hum “The Star Spangled Banner.”



In 1975, for my 18th birthday, my parents bought me a guitar. It was a Yamaha FG-160, a very pedestrian guitar for the day. The guitar cost something around $120. They didn't want to spend too much on a starter guitar; they didn't know if I'd stick with it.



When I went into the guitar store, I expected to get a left-handed guitar, me being left-handed like Jimi Hendrix. "Oh, no," she said to my mother. "We don't carry those." And then she looked at me. "You're going to learn to play it the right way."



And so it began. I never became the next Jimi Hendrix. I also learned pretty quickly that I wasn't ever going to be a shredder or a precision player of notes. But I learned to fingerpick. Some. And I learned to flatpick. Some. And I learned how to strum the guitar and keep pretty good time while I was doing it. And while I couldn't really emulate Eric Clapton as a lead guitarist, I could pretty much keep up with Neil Young.



Let me back up: in 1975, at the age of 18, my parents bought me a guitar. At an age close to the age of the oldest of you in this room, I embarked upon the journey of learning to play an instrument. I don’t count the organ lessons my parents made me take when I was eight years old from a woman who smelled like Play-Doh. Even back then, in 1975, when ROCK was king, when it ruled the FM airwaves, if you started playing guitar at the age of 18, you got the societal message that you were already too old to learn the instrument. Put it in a different perspective, one that Mr. K------ will understand. In May of 1975, I was 18 and about to learn to pluck the melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” In May of 1975, Bruce Springsteen was about 26, only 8 years older than me, and was about to release Born To Run. I had some serious catching up to do.



Two days ago, I had a student in my office who is 16 or 17, who has already decided that he can't do art. He has artistic ideas, but he imagines others with artistic skill carrying those ideas out. Art is not his thing. He is wrong, unless he wants to be. If you know that I'm 54 years old now and you do the math, you realize that I have been playing the guitar off and on for the past 36 years. What if I had spent those years learning to paint?



There isn't some amazing update to my story. It’s pretty mundane, really. At the start of college, I practiced in the stairwells of the dorms, hoping to meet girls interested in a sensitive, guitar-playing guy. It might have helped if I could play an entire song. Sophomore year, I tried to write songs with my next door neighbor the wrestler. And, after four years of college with time to practice, I got decent. In graduate school, I played in talent shows and learned how to do multi-track recording. As a young teacher, I was a founding member of the now-defunct Faculty Jams, I was part of the band for the Student Hunger Strikes, I played the Octoberfest down on the field where the sports is now, I played all of the early Jamnesties. Then, in the late 80's, I played in a Grateful Dead cover band up at Sewanee, a fine institution, I highly recommend it, with a former student. We played Shenanigans and the Student Union. I fell into the role of lead guitarist and was kind of okay at it.



I continue to play. As recently as last Spring, I played as part of the band at "Dylan Night" at Mr. K-------'s house. We had such a good time that we plan to have Neil Young Night, Springsteen Night, British Invasion Night, and who knows what else. Making music is simply fun, is simply one of the most primal human activities.



Along the way, I have owned a dulcimer until it broke, a lap steel until I gave it away, a purple '72 Strat until it seemed like a student's older brother would get more use out of it, a ukelele when I went to teach in Korea a few summers ago. One stringed instrument makes you comfortable with another. The logic of the strings makes sense on other instruments. You never know where it might lead. And, so, in short, that one birthday when I was 18 was the beginning of a major theme in my life ever since.



I hope you realize, though, that much as I love music, this isn’t about music. It doesn't have to be music, although one of the lessons I learned when I was in Korea was that a culture that steers every one of its children toward playing a musical instrument is, frankly, in some ways more cultured. But it doesn't have to be music. It could be golf or tennis, it could be pottery or poetry, it could be sports medicine or counseling or a desire to go to Divinity school.



You all face a very interesting challenge. There are so many places at a school like this that want all of your energy for immediate challenges, leadership needs, and current teams--things that this school needs you to do, things that I need you to do. But at the same time, you owe it to yourself to work on lifelong habits--in health, in reading, in community service and other developing passions. How do you prepare for both the now and the future?



There is no easy answer, but there are some simple realities. If you put just 30 minutes a day into guitar practice, by the time you reached my age, you would have put 6,570 hours into practicing the guitar. While I realize that only puts you a third of the way on the path to becoming a Malcolm Gladwell Outliers 20,000 Hours Stud, I also know that once you got into it, you wouldn’t practice only 30 minute a day. You’d start jamming, you’d play in a band, you’d perform, you’d work on a song or some scales or an idea or the recording of a track, sometimes for hours, maybe even days, at a time.



The other reality is that when you start something new, you aren’t very good at it. It may be some time before you are able to or are asked to do something very significant with it. But the time matters, the practice matters, the focus matters.



Playing guitar for a guy like me is not a vocation; it is an alternative lifestyle, a parallel universe. There is my life with wife and family, there is my school life, and there is my life with guitar, with music, with CDs, with learning and playing and writing and singing songs. Sometimes these lives intersect, and that is good. But sometimes they don’t, and when they don’t, then I realize that I have enough years in with the guitar that it deserves some of my attention.



None of you sitting in the pews in this room know, really know, which of your myriad experiences here at school will stick, will take you in a different direction for the rest of your lives. I don’t either. But I promise you that something will. I’ve known students for whom one book, one team, one club, one person, one course, one casual experience with a CD that they heard in someone else’s dorm room or in someone else’s car changed everything that followed. I’ve known students who turned a stint on the school paper into a career in journalism. I’ve even known a student who saw the movie Top Gun and immediately quit college and joined the Navy to go to flight school.



But we simply cannot know what experiences here will affect you the most. What we do know is that something will. These are impressionable, formative years for you, when your minds are still forming, when you are still trying out ideas, and so, we are obligated to present you with a mix of what you can accomplish now and what you might not even wake up to for another 10 or 20 years and say, Oh, I think I’d be interested in doing that once again. I urge you, please, to look for the balance between what you are good at now and what will take some time to develop.



So consider the piano or the 9 iron or the culinary club kitchen or the kayak or the story for the Argonaut or the tutoring of children or the open 9th grade spots on Student Council or a camera or the Senior Chapel Talk or the spot on the Student Vestry. What might they lead to?



Or even the guitar. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be the next Jimi Hendrix. I’ve left that door open for you.