I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, because I know from long experience that they tend to be swept out with the eggshells and coffee grounds sometime around the end of the first week of January, and I like to save myself the embarrassment that my own broken resolutions cause me. Sometimes I toy with various resolutions, however, trying them on and then, more often than not, rejecting them. Here are a few that I'm idly considering this year:
1. No longer swearing like a truck-driver, if only inside the echo-chamber of my own head. I almost never swear in front of my son (not in English, anyway, though I have to admit to having said some really gutter things in Italian at times, when I've stepped on a Lego, say, or given myself a paper cut), and I've been very relieved that he's never yet, to my knowledge, said a curse-word (at least not in English). And yet, we now know that swearing is much more effective at relieving pain and frustration than consciously resorting to blithe euphemisms; the real words just seem to work, and are so much more satisfying emotionally, perhaps because of their taboo status. I often take myself into another room alone so I can swear out loud in English, but mostly those four-letter bombs are just dropping in the quiet of my mind as I face the frustrations of the average day. And yet, for all the silence of my cursing, it still doesn't seem . . . seemly to even think those words. So perhaps I'll silently substitute some corny-sounding euphemisms in my inner monologue in 2011. Or perhaps not.
2. Giving up coffee. I consider undertaking this heroic feat every so often, and even went so far as to make it my Lenten sacrifice a couple of years ago, an intention which lasted one solid day. The truth is, I sometimes go for whole weeks without drinking coffee, but I have no wish to put it away from me forever. Not only do I love the taste -- it's one of my favorite flavors, the darker and bitterer the better (no sugar, and lightened with half-and-half or cream; if only milk is available, I will forgo the coffee altogether) -- but I also love the idea of coffee. There is something so companionable about it. Two mothers having coffee together while their children play are engaging in a kind of conspiracy of community, it seems to me. Tea, though I drink it, seems insubstantial and a bit fey in comparison, and herbal tea is something I dislike and generally avoid unless there's a medicinal reason for taking it. (It's crossed my mind once or twice that if I gave up coffee, perhaps I would be able to conceive again; I've heard the anecdotal notion that coffee suppresses fertility. But the truth is that I was drinking coffee all the other times I conceived; I believe God intends for us to add children to our family through adoption; and the possibility seems strong that conception wouldn't occur, and then I would have . . . given up coffee. Is this a foolish, fetishistic, fatalistic line of reasoning? Perhaps. Maybe I will give up coffee after all, though it will be with great reluctance.)
3. Being more patient. My son, who's quite advanced in some ways, is quite delayed in others. He doesn't draw (though he is very specific in directing his parents and teachers to draw according to his designs), partially because of his fine-motor delays, and partially because he's intensely perfectionistic, and melts down completely when he attempts to draw something that doesn't come out as he'd envisioned. Today I was helping him draw a tugboat puffing smoke. He was trying to draw circles for the smoke, but, as he said, his circles had tails. He flung himself down in tears, and didn't want to continue. This brought me to tears too, because I felt that he had to. The ability to practice a skill until it virtually becomes ingrained into the sinews of the heart, and the ability to love that relentless practice, are probably the most important capacities I've cultivated in my life. But how can I teach a volatile, neurologically-puzzling preschool boy to love practice, to love discipline? I was stymied. With him, I realize that I will have to take many deep breaths and work very slowly on the same basic skills over and over again, when I want him to dance, to leap, to fly, as the ethos of intense practice has allowed me to do. He is the sort of child who, I believe, will fly eventually; he is very bright, musical, and imaginative. But I am so attached to the idea of self-discipline as the means to becoming skilled and independent, and to the notion of becoming skilled and independent as the means to intellectual and artistic freedom. I suppose that, in 2011, I should resolve to learn how to slow down my own wild thinking and imagining.
Which, to sum up, is why I love this ad from the 1980s. It suggests that, when you're hitting the wall in your ethos of relentless practicing, and especially if you're a musician whose work is starting to sound like sh--, you need . . . coffee. I guess the shadowy forces of the coffee-industrial complex figured, back in those pre-Starbucks days, that Americans just weren't drinking enough of it.
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