The Joy of Discovery

I got a piano about a year ago. Our neighbors were redoing their flooring and wanted to get rid of a beautiful, black upright. Pianos are a tricky instrument to own. They’re expensive, require yearly maintenance and tuning, and are wildly heavy and awkward to move. For most of us they become nothing more than expensive dust collectors once our initial interest wanes. It’s a lot cheaper to buy a treadmill for a better dollar to dust-collecting-surface-area value.

Either way, I bought the piano. My first thought after deciding to buy the thing was, “I’m sure me and my neighbor can move it.” I was wrong. I ended up paying professional movers just to get it from next door. I’m glad I did. It took three people to carefully maneuver the thing into my 1st floor office. Even just a couple stairs proved to be a challenge even with the right equipment.

I had to wait a couple weeks before tuning it. Pianos need time to settle into their new environments. My next thought was, “how hard could it be to tune? I know how to tune guitars, it’s probably the same basic idea.” I was wrong again. Turns out piano tuning is part skill and part art with lots of subtle nuance to it. It’s far from just turning knobs until the tuner goes green. Apparently you have to consider how the harmonics in the body affect other strings to avoid unintentional vibrations. You need to be carefully mentored and it can take years to get good at it. Wild.

I hired a professional to tune it. I asked him if he’d let me sit in the session because I was curious about how the process worked. He was kind and obliged. I learned how to properly take apart the piano and started to get an idea for how the thing worked. It was both less and more scary than I expected in different ways. It turns out most keys are actually hitting more than one string. Some of the higher notes have three strings for each key! That amounts to a lot of knobs.

The tuner man, as I’ll call him, was delightful and I could tell he was happy to have someone interested in their piano asking him questions. He was clearly passionate and enjoyed sharing some of his knowledge. He showed me how each of the pedals mechanically worked, how when you pressed a key a muting hammer lifted while another one struck the strings. It was fascinating. If I sat long enough and pressed a single key I started to understand how the mechanism worked. Fat chance I’d be able to replicate it but my understanding of it was quickly expanding.

I felt the joy of discovery.

I tried learning the piano when I was kid. I didn’t make it very far beyond chopsticks and Mary Had a Little Lamb through stuttered sight reading. Piano playing ended up as another hobby in the junkyard of childhood things I wanted to learn but never had the motivation to continue. It sat alongside skateboarding, yo-yoing, fencing, gymnastics, juggling, unicycling, programming, and the iconic recorder flute to name a few. Each activity seemed only to add more to the collective weight of shame I felt for being bad at sticking to things. I was concerned about the same happening as an adult.

By this time though I’d had a couple other activities under my belt that seemed to suggest the trend had shifted. Not to brag but I’m pretty good at yo-yo’ing now. My new strategy felt like the winning approach for me: I would resist learning proper technique.

That’s right. I would intentionally force myself to avoid learning how to properly play the piano. I was more interested in the process of discovering the piano than I was of mastering it. I wanted to give my ears time to learn to listen. I wanted to learn to play. It may seem like a subtle difference. For me it’s made all the difference.

I began by simply sitting at Grace, as my wife affectionately named her, and allowed myself to feel what it was like to play different keys together. It’s been at times a painfully slow process but I’ve started to develop a nascent intuition about how certain keys work, or don’t work, together. For example, I discovered that B and C played next to each other convey a certain sad feeling. I discovered that minor scales are embedded within major scales and it’s simply a matter of the order in which you play the keys that gives them a completely different feel. One sad, the other bright and cheerful - all on the same set of keys.

I’ve played Grace daily for the last year and she still surprises me. I’m far from being a good piano player, but I’m coming to the conclusion that it was always a poor goal for me. Learning to love things for the simple pleasure of discovery affords far more joy than supposed mastery.

What is mastery anyway? For me it’s largely a benchmark against another person that’s arbitrary. Chasing mastery, as a means to achieve what someone else has, never yields the result I actually seek: joy. The joy of simply enjoying something for the hidden beauty it possesses. The joy of discovering secrets waiting for those willing to sit long enough and just play and make mistakes and laugh by themselves.

There’s something else about discovery I’ve been thinking about. I’ve always thought that discovery was rewarding in proportion to the scarcity of knowledge about the subject. For example, suppose I were to discover the same gravitation constant that Isaac Newton discovered. I later learn that it had already been well studied and I could have just Googled it. Suddenly my discovery feels worthless. It’s already known, so what bother? Even further is the thought that the discovery was harmful to me. After all, I could have been spending my time on something more “useful” instead of walking what turned out to be a worn path.

But what about the joy I felt before I had known Isaac, old boy, had already figured it out? It was very much real for me. Why do I need to give that up? I don’t think I do. Why can’t I be an explorer of the apparently “known”? Perhaps the known is less known than we think. Perhaps there are still far more discoveries to be made waiting in plain sight around us. Maybe they’ll only reveal themselves to those curious and unconcerned with comparison.

I suspect so. Even if I’m wrong, it sure makes life more interesting.