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Over the last two weeks I have been working on relearning the violin, an instrument I haven’t played in decades and one with a notoriously tough learning curve which probably means there is no possible route to mastery in my lifetime. I knew it was going to be this way and worked on lowering my expectations on m progress beforehand. With eight hours of practice in, I started thinking about the way people learn things like this in an organized way and wanted to set down my ideas.
I have been attracted to religion from an early age, though I have lots of friends and acquaintances who have no interest in it or have an active dislike of it. Towards them I bear no ill will, though I understand that this blog post is probably not going to be their kind of thing.
For Lent I listened to the audiobook version of Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward as my assignment and it was an experience of a contrary way of looking and doing things.
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One of the things I like best about the end of the year has to do with music, which is one of the main ways I pass the time all year round. Now, I don’t hang around in places featuring non-stop Christmas carols on loop so that is not the kind of thing I’m referring to. I am also not big on the music countdown segments that certain DJs like to put out during the last week of the year.
Twice a year, during Advent and Lent, I try to do some spiritual reading as a discipline, and this Lent I’m reading St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle, generally accounted to be a masterpiece of contemplation. The idea is that the human soul is pictured as a transparent castle containing many rooms, sort of a diamond cloister, the most impregnable fortress against the dangers of the outside world. It was natural that this member of a cloistered order would write based upon something she knew, of course, but the interesting thing will be how much I can make of this idea living in the world.
In 2016 I went to a bunch of technical talks, none of which I intend to discuss right now, and all of which armed with a cameraphone along with everybody else in the audience. In this day of Slideshare and official corporate tech blogs many of the presentations will make it up to the web in pristine form, so why would anyone want to take a crooked, out of focus, keystone distorted, and sometimes half second too late picture of the screen?
